Website
The old design of Kā Mōʻī prior to me taking over the online
Before I took over as the Website/Technology Director for Kā Mōʻī in January of 2019, I would check the website out and I never liked the look of it. I found the website to be too boring and bland. The layout of the website was too cluttered and attracted your eyes away from the stories because there was an overload of information for the eyes to process at once. I talked to my advisor about taking over the online for the remaining of the school year after scheduling conflicts didnʻt allow me to take the class during my junior year. I was, however, an off staff contributor and I helped with the media for the class. I decided that I would do minor changes for the website during my first semester as the website editor because I wanted to see how it was used for the class. I took careful notes of how everything worked and I learned slowly by slowly how to navigate the SNO platform. I looked at the schools that received the best website award from SNO and I took notes on their design and flow option. By the end of the school year, I had formulated a plan to do a total redesign of the website that would change the way that the online is ran and redesigned.
The new website after I took over
I have had past experiences with making websites as I have made some for my club, my motherʻs business, and school projects. Over the summer of 2019, I asked my advisor to completely overhaul the old design and change everything. After I got his approval, I began the process of changing everything from layout, to comments, to polls, etc. I finalized my design for the website in August just as the new school year began. We changed our masthead to a more colorful design, the layout changed, more reader interactive features, we allowed comments once again, and much more.
Website Extras
Weather Radar
On Feb. 9th, I implemented a doppler weather radar that included a 7 day forecast onto the website. My thinking was that it would allow students and teachers a place to view the weather much like how the big news companies have their own weather app or a link on their app. It was mainly created for the mobile app to make our app more cutting edge.
On Dec. 3rd, I setup a poster for our instagram too. Unlike our Twitter autoposter, our instagram poster needs to be manually confirmed before it is posted. This plugin was the only one that I found after research that would provide the service up to our standards for free. The poster has a similair layout to our twitter by taking the article headline, article image, a short blurb, tags, and the story URL. We have a bigger base on our instagram account and it has been a good avenue for us to use to advertise. One of our stories had over 1,200 likes and just under 200 comments.
Mobile App
My biggest project that I have undertaken was creating the mobile app. This was a 5 month involvement that involved my institutions technology, financial, legal, and administrative departments to approve of it. We launched the app on Feb. 4th for our school with a launch party that ran all day long giving each person who downloaded the app a brownie. The launch generated 300 downloads and increased traffic 150 percent.
Collaborations
Under my direction, I have opened up collaboration between Kā Mōʻī and our different departments such as our school broadcasting team (Puka Mai Ka Lā), our student government (ASKS), and our schoolʻs athletic department. These ventures were never pursued fully in the past. By collaborating with these different departments, we were able to post the morning announcements from our school broadcasting team, know when and what events were happening around school, and be able to obtain information on the sports occurring at the time.
On Dec. 2nd, I setup an autoposter for our twitter. This was a wordpress Plugin that I found after extensive research and comparison to others like it. As soon as a story is posted, this plugin takes the headline of the article, a short overview of the story, the article image and puts into a tweet with the link to the story. This saves us time from having to manually make tweets for our stories. It gives our social media audience a short blurb into the story attracting them to that story.
Accounts
Throughout my time as the technology director, I have created and maintained multiple online accounts. I have created a youtube channel, soundcloud, staff portal, google drive, anchor, apple and google developer accounts, issuu, and many more. These accounts all seamlessly work hand in hand together and it is my job to make sure it is maintained properly.