Wisconsin Decarceration Platform
The Wisconsin Decarceration Platform is a group based in Milwaukee formed to provide resources to those impacted by the criminal justice system. I worked very closely with people with less experience with technology to turn their ideas into features of the site. This project shows that I have experience in talking to people not as well-versed in the tech space and am able to communicate my technical ideas in a way they can understand. My position was (and still is) the Webmaster of their Weebly website. I took information they had, moved it, and formatted it in a way that is easier to digest and sift through so that visitors to the site could find what they were looking for more quickly. I also added features that Weebly doesn’t natively support through custom HTML and JavaScript, like adding an events page that generates an attractive list of events from inputted data.
I was able to establish and maintain a common design language throughout this project, scaling it as more information was added. A large part of this project was the site’s organization, and I feel I have made a great blueprint for how information is presented on all parts of the site. A large challenge I had with the site at first is that since Weebly doesn’t easily support databases, the data is not actually stored anywhere except for on the webpages themselves. While this is not an issue for many sections of the site, for parts that needed to be generated with common style like an events page, static text boxes were not going to cut it. I solved this roadblock by storing the data in JSON format in a custom HTML block, then in that same block used some JavaScript to manipulate the data and generate HTML based on the events data, hiding events if they’ve passed. Through working on the Wisconsin Decarceration Platform, I have improved my communication skills, especially when speaking to people not well-versed in the tech space. Being able to translate between tech speak and common English will be an especially useful tool for me in the future.
I also, through some trial and error, found a method of organization to take in many small requests, prioritize, then act on them in a timely manner, something that will also very much help my disorderly brain in my years to come. I also learned some very simple image editing techniques when cutting and coloring photos to use as icons on the homepage, something I didn’t know I would be able to figure out so easily. While I’ve used HTML before, I had never used JavaScript to generate an entire page of it, so figuring out that I could dynamically update an entire webpage as data changed was a very interesting technique that I will definitely be using on future projects. As for opportunities for improvements, I would love to look into making more complex uses of dynamic HTML updates without page refreshes.
