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Lauren Wools graduated from PSU in December 2020 with a degree in web and interactive media. Before her departure, she began a class project for Web Content and Management Systems where she worked with her classmates to create a website for the City of Columbus.
“I am so happy about how this project turned out,” Wools said. “This website was definitely the biggest project I’ve ever worked on and I think it looks amazing.”
After putting so much effort into the project, Wools was excited to stay on and see it through to completion.
“I really wanted to continue working on this project and see it to its end, especially after my classmates and I put so much work into it during the class,” Wools said.
Wools worked closely with Columbus city officials and was routinely in contact with them about the site.
“I was in constant communication with the City of Columbus officials,” Wools said. “Every day we emailed back and forth, discussing minor changes to the site and sharing text content and images, and then once roughly every two weeks we would meet in person in Columbus to go over the whole site design and discuss any larger changes to the site.”
The project gave way to other opportunities for Wools.
“After the Columbus website went live in September, members of… (Harveyville’s) city council saw it being shared on Facebook and ended up reaching out to me about creating a new website for their town,” Wools said.
Wools enjoys the collaborative effort it takes to bring these projects to life.
“I have definitely enjoyed working with smaller towns and being able to get to know the people involved with these governments,” Wools said. “I would love to continue working with these types of organizations in the future. As for my plans right now, I am working with Harveyville… on their new website and looking at open web developer positions in the area.”
When creating a website, designers start with a sketch of the layout of the site then recreate it using a prototyping software such as Adobe XD. At that point, the designers start making decisions about color scheme, fonts, images, and writing text content. After that, they move on to creating the website either by hand-coding it or through a website builder like WordPress.
“I just wanted to make sure to highlight my classmates who also worked on this project while we were in Web Content Management Systems,” Wools said. “This project originally began as our final for that class and we all worked together to create the design for the website.”
The website for the city of Columbus can be found at https://columbusks.gov/.