Sweet Suite Lovin'

As I am finishing up work at BYU (last day is August 13, graduation day for Scott!), I have thought a lot about what I have gained from my experiences here. Maybe one of the best benefits of working at BYU has been the ability to take classes for free. And by far, the most fun I've had in any class at BYU, is learning from BYU's Office of Information Technology.

I first registered for these classes because my supervisor wanted to improve the look and function of the employer side website. For this task I took most of the Adobe Suite classes - Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash (that workshop may have been too short), and Captivate (wasn't for the website but that would be cool). I had so much fun practicing the skills that I learned that I may have gone a bit overboard. I created stick figures, blog background, graduation announcements, and thought about website ideas.

Then right before I was planning my last day, the announcement came out that another Dreamweaver class was being offered. I hadn't taken this before, because I know HTML and didn't think it would be necessary to creat the webpage. But now that the UCS webpage is live, and I have to turn it over to students to update when I leave, I wanted to see if Dreamweaver would be helpful for them to maintenance the site. The UCS website is currently maintained with Druple content management, but I prefer even then to use the full PHP to edit.

My verdict - Dreamweaver rocks my socks off! I am having so much fun learning all of the gadgets for adding code to a website. This is just an example from what we were learning to create today.

haha! I totally just realized I wrote "Hi! I'm Emily" instead of Elizabeth... good thing this is a class"

But in the end, I'm not sure that it's worth me putting all the website pages into Dreamweaver. Whether the website content is in Dreamweaver or Druple, the student who's helping maintain the website will still need to understand HTML if they want to do anything different to the website besides editing text. So we'll just keep it backed up the way it is.

That doesn't mean that it was a waste of a class. NOT AT ALL! I am anxious to put together a website with my ideas, and to keep playing with the widgets. Call me a geek, that's fine! I'll even buy myself a pocket protector, as long as I can still play with the sweet Suite tools Adobe has to offer!