My personal interest in web design in the late nineties and onward has provided me a solid foundation for basic web authoring. With a keen eye for aesthetics and consistency, I am skilled with HTML and familiar with CSS, as well as simple graphics creation and manipulation (and throwing together a blog or wiki should go without saying). While I wouldn’t sell myself as a professional web designer capable of the programming- and architecture-intensive sites required by most libraries, I am comfortable creating basic sites from the ground up and digging into the depths of more complex sites to create new pages, make updates and see how things work (as well as why they might be broken).
I am also interested in user interface and experience, intelligent and integrated content organization and making things look and sound sharp. Creating online content has been a superb way to expand and exploit my writing skills, experimenting with different styles and tones for various information objectives: promoting services, explaining concepts, detailing procedures, and more.
UVic Libraries pages
| Working at the University of Victoria in 2008, I created and updated dozens of pages for the libraries’ website, from information literacy guides and pathfinders to FAQs for the institutional repository.
With a focus on providing clear, relevant and engaging material, I wrote and designed the content for these pages based on a review of the related literature, other university library websites, consultation with my colleagues and my own experiences with student and faculty information needs, behaviors, perceptions and misconceptions. Realizing that space—and viewer attentions spans—are at a premium with web delivery, I aimed for brevity while selecting content I deemed the most important and useful from a user’s perspective. To the right are a few pages I created for UVic. These are images to ensure their stability; as such, internal links will not work. To read more about these pages, check out my co-op reflection website report, “Meg Holle, Library Helper,” described below. |
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Other websites
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The Death Reference DeskThis site focuses on timely death topics and serves as a bona fide email reference desk; I designed it with a modified WordPress theme. Though technically a collaboration with two colleagues, I am currently responsible for most of the content, including a substantial amount of writing and research for blog posts, research guides and the answering of reference questions. Learn more about the DRD. |
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Meg Holle, Library HelperI based this site on a free CSS template, modifying it for my needs. It describes a work term at the University of Victoria, during which I created several web pages. It includes the examples shown above and more, with an analysis of my web-authoring process and thoughts on issues of writing for the web. |
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The Beer Snoob ThesaurusFor my indexing course, I built a website for a group project where we created a thesaurus for a hypothetical collection of our choice. Uh, we chose beer reviews, and I went with a stripped down HTML site peppered with CSS to show off our indexing skills. I wrote the content on the About page and helped determine thesaurus terms; my groupmates tackled the rest, though all design (images, layout, etc.) is my own. |
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d e e p s i c k sDeepsicks is my personal website of creative nonfiction and photography. As a six-year-old site, it contains my most substantial work in web design. The front end is powered by WordPress using a hacked-to-pieces theme, complete with tag cloud, search, RSS and Twitter feed, while a few ancient HTML pages lurk in the background (sometimes Web 1.0 still does it best). |
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