Our semester-long project has four segments: Second Life (identity); Digital Remix (intervention); Film (meaning); and finally, a construction. This construction was to have taken place on Second Life's Clemson development island, but overcrowding and budget constraints forced a change of plans; so the final segment is a Web site.
I had thought that making the film would be my most challenging project; I was wrong. It is definitely the Web site. This surprised me, as I have spent the past 10 years editing, if not building, the Web site at the company where I worked. I was pretty well versed in HTML and PHP and knew how to navigate my way around the directory system.
Well, I really struggled here! And I've also struggled with Web development in Clemson's Cascade Management System. It is not user friendly and also constrains design. For this class, Dreamweaver was the suggested technology. While I rely heavily on the Adobe CS4 trilogy of InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, Dreamweaver leaves me out in the cold. I do not find the program either intuitive or easy to navigate. So my original intent was to build from scratch in CSS, but I was warned against that by a web development professional due to the short turnaround time for this project.
I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my site, which brings together all four of the project segments. But it wasn't happening for me in Dreamweaver and I was tied up in knots, both emotionally and physically! Then my classmate, Brandon, whose own Web site is really "ballin'," told me he built his in iWeb, a Mac program. "You have it," he said. I opened my laptop, located the program, and within two hours had built the framework for my site. This program lets you drag and drop information, use a template or build your own from a blank page (my choice), and seamlessly builds the code for you in the background. I finished my site in no time at all, save for building the needed graphics.
My main focus for the site was the visual construction of "signature" golf holes that signified my theme: The Rhetoric of Golf: Ethos, Pathos, Logos. I wanted to build golf holes that illustrated the language used in my movie, and that signified the logos, the sexual innuendos so inherent to the game. I had intended, in Second Life, to build a hole that resembled the female anatomy, a uterus and ovaries, with a river of blood. What better way for a golfer to fulfill his dream of "scoring" than by forcing the ball "long and hard down the middle?" So this is now one of my "signature holes" on my golf course Web site. I also designed the Par 3 hole on which I got my virtual hole in one, and a Par 5 hole for good measure. The holes are depicted as thumbnails on my Web page, and serve as hyperlinks to larger views with hole descriptions (logos).
I built the holes in Illustrator. This was a challenge for me; Illustrator is the software in the proverbial "trilogy" that I have used the least. And I wanted to design swatches to symbolize the natural landscape of the golf course, something I had never done before. I designed swatches for the fairway, with mower stripes, for the water (both blue and red -- the red is for my "female" hole where the creek bank is the typical South Carolina red clay), for the bushes/trees, and for the marsh. I used solid colors and gradients for the greens and the bunkers. I really like my golf holes! They turned out so much better than I had imagined possible. And I learned a lot, which is important.
On a lighter note, if you visit my site, you'll see that my Galaxy Golf Links fantasy course is located in Sugar Tit, SC. This is (or was) a real town near Clemson! During our movie-making weekend, Beth told Brandon and I about it -- and I said, "That's where I'll put my golf course!" It suited my theme.
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