This week we were instructed to evaluate websites of COPLAC’s past.

The first website I decided to visit was one from my own school, UMW, from last semester for the COPLAC course titled “Into the Woods: Experiments in Community, Sustainability, and the Examined Life.” The first thing I was impressed with was the photo gallery header on their home page. It was the perfect way for them to display what their website contained to help make their overall point. The photos with their captions acted like an overview in a way. We might implement something similar in our home page.

The one thing that I think their website is lacking is engaging content. As I clicked through each page (and there were a lot of pages) I noticed that the structure was mostly a quote followed by a small paragraph and that’s it. Only a few pages included a picture or two but those pictures were small and seemed tacked on at the end. I would have liked to see slideshows or other tools that we learned in our own class and larger pictures with more text. I just felt that most pages were bare and a few of them could have been combined into one page to better support their thesis.

The second website I decided to visit was the Montevallo website from spring of last year for COPLAC course titled “The Social Life of Books.” The theme the students chose for this website was extremely simple and didn’t make much use of the screen space, but their page layout was extremely appealing to the eye. They had a good balance between text and image so their wouldn’t be blocks of text and then several images. That is something I think we need to incorporate more of in our site. The balance is present on our home page and our national androgynous page, but we rely heavily on an embedded timeline or slideshow for the other pages which leaves blocks of text below the embedded feature. We might pull a few images out that help support our argument in the text to help break up the sea of words.

While I was really impressed and learned a lot about the history of Montevallo’s College Night (which is similar to UMW’s Devil Goat Day), I was confused by their pages under their production books tab. It seems the earlier years have a lot of content that the site’s authors were able to scan in and include, but there’s an information imbalance between that and the recent years. Perhaps this is because the tradition no longer needs such diligent record keeping because it digs into records of the past, but if that is so, I would have liked to see an explanation of that rather than only information on which team won: purple or gold?

Overall, I am impressed with both websites. They did quite a bit of research and I am glad to see that our website is coming up to the same level of academic scholarship as websites of the past. We obviously still have quite a bit of tweaking to make sure our thesis is fully and clearly supported, but with about two weeks before our final presentation I am confident we will get it to an equal level or better than the websites I reviewed today.

This week I decided to visit MSU’s website and JSC’s website.

MSU

I was immediately pleased by the simplicity of this website. The cleanliness of it’s layout made it not only pleasing to the eye but also easy to read. I also loved the set of of the text into three parts: the about section, the analysis, and the identity conclusion. The continuity of this set up with each organization makes it easy to follow and I especially love the conclusion page that ties all the organizations’ fashion trends together at the end. The structure of this site is really strong and it appears to be almost done. The only part missing seems to be the oral history. Overall, this is a great website! My only suggestion is for the site creators to create a personal header/logo. The MSU logo works, but it kind of makes it seem like the website is something the school set up and not a personal project for school if that makes sense. I think creating a header/logo will not only add some extra creativity to the website but also help the website visitors get a sense of the tone of the website they are about to explore.

JSC

I love the giant scenic photo of the school as the header. I don’t know why but for some reason I can imagine Maria from The Sound of Music twirling around on that campus. Anyway, as I scrolled down I was a little confused. I’m not really sure what the website’s goal is. Perhaps to compare and contrast ’70s fashion with the fashion of today? It is a little unclear because instead of pages there are just posts which makes it a little difficult to read. I would suggest turning those posts into pages. If you don’t know how, Corey does! He built our website because pages are something I am clueless on. I also, understand that you don’t have all your content up (I don’t either), but I do suggest coming up with a different way of presenting the photos. I think if you put them in Google Slides and then embed the slides into your page, they will be larger. Right now they are very small and hard to see. My final suggestion is to come up with a unique title that clues visitors into the topic of the site and maybe also spells out what JSC stands for since some people may not know.

Unfortunately, we were not able to accomplish everything that we wanted to accomplish in time for the draft submission. Our site is very unfinished right now. Most pages only contain a slideshow or timeline and no words to add context to those elements. The only page with context is the national page under the androgynous tab. I started working on that late last night after doing a lot of reading on androgynous fashion history. It seems that every fashion scholar and journalist has a different idea of exactly what makes fashion androgynous and where androgynous fashion stood in the ’80s.

As for the elements on each page we do have, they are only half done. The slideshows only contain the latter half of the ’80s. Corey is supposed to be finding pictures from the earlier half. I know he’s a busy guy so I have no clue if he just didn’t have time or forgot, but I’m confident it will get done by the final date. The same is true about out timelines. We wanted timelines to help identify the origins of some of these trends in the ’80s but pinpointing origins is harder than we thought. The best we can do is find the trends that celebrities wore in concert and on television that were later popularized.

So as you can see, we still have a lot of work to do to finish this site. Corey will (hopefully) soon add to the slideshows and timelines and write the context for a few of our pages and I will write the context for the remaining pages. Then we will both edit each others context for continuity. I’m also hoping to add a few header images at the beginning of each page just to add more color and break up the text so it is a little more appealing to the eye, making it easier to read. I think we will also get rid of the local page under the androgynous tab unless Corey is able to find examples of androgynous fashion in the early half of the ’80s yearbooks. And hopefully Corey will upload his interview with his American Studies professor soon. I know we discussed trimming the end of his interview to create a cleaner finish, but I’m not sure if he got around to doing so. Our work is definitely cut out for us.

So I closed my eyes and moved my mouse across the links of sites to decide which ones to admire and critique for this blog post. The first link I clicked on was the site for Montevallo. I was immediately greeted by a picture of the archway of Montevallo, which I loved. It felt very welcoming. When I scrolled down, there was a map so I could see where Montevallo was and what it’s city looked like. That was followed by a brief history of the school. The history was my favorite part. I love the tone of voice in it. It is almost a little tongue in cheek. I also applaud those first two men who decided to go to an all girls school. That must have been terrifying but thrilling. I only have two critiques. The first is that the header of the website seems a little messy too me since there is the COPLAC logo and the Montevallo logo and the picture of the arch again. A simple logo or title header would be more pleasing to the eye. I used canva.com to make our header for our site. It’s really easy to use and free. I use it for everything! I also suggest making the pictures larger on the 1950s page because as they are, viewers can’t see them in detail. Other than that, I’m excited to see what else I can learn from Montevallo’s site, like I said the voice of the text is amusing so I look forward to reading more like that.

The next link I clicked on was for Truman State’s website. I loved the header image immediately! It’s a subtle image which works perfectly because it won’t distract from the information below it. I think my favorite part of this site was the fact that there is images of the handbook that dictated what women wore in the ’80s. That is so interesting since universities don’t typically regulate clothing like that anymore. I also loved the captions under the photos. They are hilarious (though slightly sexist, but it was the ’50s)! I just have one critique. I wish the images were larger. Montevallo had small images too. I haven’t tried uploading images to our site yet so I don’t know if it’s even possible to make the images larger. I hope so because I really want to zoom in to see the clothes. Also, this is kind of tedious but I suggest scanning the images from the yearbook onto the computer rather than taking pictures of the page. This will create a much cleaner image and framing. Most libraries (I’m assuming Truman State keeps their yearbooks in the library) contain a scanner somewhere in them so maybe try that. I think it would make the images more impactful. Overall, I can’t wait to see what the captions are for images in the other decades! I wonder how the captions’ tones will change throughout the decades.

Everything. We haven’t actually played with the layout yet. Since Corey has done a similar project and knows quite a bit more about about website design than I do, we both decided that he should be the one to design our site. We also decided that quality content is our top priority because Corey’s knowledge of site building means that we can get that done quickly whereas quality content takes time. For that reason, our site is still in it’s basic form we were given. We do have plans for it though so I’ll try my best to outline those plans below.

• The site will have an ’80s print header to clue visitors in immediately on our topic.
• There will be four pages for visitors to click on:
  1. Thesis page
  2. Women’s Fashion in the ’80s
  3. Men’s Fashion in the ’80s
  4. Androgynous Fashion in the ’80s
• When visitors hover their mouse over those pages they will be given two options:
  1. National Level
  2. Local Level
• After clicking on the national level tab visitors will see a timeline of cultural events that affected trends in the ’80s for either men, women, or androgynous. This will be followed by a few paragraphs that further explain the important connections between these cultural events and their affect on trends.
• After clicking on the local level tab visitors will see a slideshow of images pulled from UMW yearbooks in the ’80s for either men, women, or androgynous. This will also be followed by a few paragraphs that further explain why trends from the national level were or were not seen on campus at the time. This will also be where visitors can listen to our oral histories with the experts on this topic.

I hope that made sense and painted a good picture of what we are hoping to accomplish in the upcoming weeks. I’m sorry we haven’t made any major progress this week. It is our spring break and I’m not sure how Corey spent his, but I spent mine exploring the streets of New York City! We will get back on the productive track next week.

In case you want to see the progress we haven’t made, here is a link to our site!

So I went through all the photo sharing options before I finally settled on embedding Google Slides into this post. Corey and I plan to include slideshows on our website of the images we find in UMW yearbooks that we think exemplify what people wore on our campus in the ’80s. I began experimenting with Flickr. I thought you could create an embeddable slideshow gallery on Flickr, but every time I embedded my gallery it would just show the first picture as if I uploaded the picture into this post straight from my computer so unless I was doing something wrong, that was pointless. I then decided to see what options WordPress has for gallery uploads. If you click “Add Media” at the top of the text box and upload your images, you will see that you can create a gallery. I tried that. It just uploaded all of the images individually. That still wasn’t what I wanted. I’m sure there are some plugins that create galleries, but I think those are static to the page rather than the post, which might work for our final website, but that doesn’t really work for this blog. Finally, I decided to make a Google Slides presentation of the photos. It was easier than I thought and though I did not add any text or anything to fill up the blank space around the edges of the photos, I’m glad we have that option open to us for the final slideshow we will create. I’m sure we will use text in order to draw attention to certain parts of the photo like the jewelry, hair, etc.

Anyway, enjoy these photos from the late ’80s. These aren’t all of them, they are just some of my favorites from 1985 and 1986. I didn’t want to share all of them yet because I want to leave some things a surprise on our final website.

So I went into this a little pessimistic. I’ve made podcasts a few times in the past for class and I always used my iPhone to record and Garage Band on my Mac to edit. I was a little like an old person when I found out I have to learn Audacity to do this blog post. I wasn’t planning on learning Audacity because I already had a program that worked for me. However, I reluctantly downloaded Audacity onto my laptop just for this.

I began by coming up with a few interview questions. My interview had to be fashion related, but I could interview anyone I wanted. I ultimately decided to interview my friends about campus fashion and the things they see that irk them. I came up with five questions and decided to interview three people. The first person was my best friend and total fashionista, Kelly. She was the most animated about the topic. I then decided to get a fashionisto’s perspective so I interviewed my boyfriend. However, that interview was outside, it was a windy day and he was a little timid to be interviewed so that audio had to be tossed out. He basically just reiterated what Kelly had said anyway. My final interview was with my friend, Ryan, who doesn’t care about fashion and wears the same hoodie, jeans, and sneakers to class everyday. I should probably mention that I recorded all of these interviews on my iPhone because it was easier to pull out than my laptop and a little less noticeable to them as I interviewed them.

Once I downloaded (Uploaded? What’s the difference?) my audio files to my computer and to Audacity, it was time to start playing around with them. I was slow at first. I could not figure out how to split files or cut files, but luckily YouTube exists so I just watched tutorials until I figured it out. Once I found all the functions that I’m used to in Garage Band, it was easy to adapt to Audacity. It’s actually much more user friendly than Garage Band. I also realized late into my audio editing that I need to have an intro, outro, and something to connect the two audio clips together so I had to record on Audacity. Usually, my laptop doesn’t record the best audio but it did this time. I think it actually came out clearer than my iPhone audio.

After I had all my audio edited and arranged the way I liked, it was time to download it. That was a pain in the butt. I don’t like that you have to download something separate from the internet in order to download MP3 files from Audacity. It took me a while to understand what I had to do but hopefully that was a one time thing and I won’t have trouble downloading again.

Overall, I actually think I prefer Audacity over my old methods. I’m a stubborn person so it takes a lot to change my mind about something. Anyway, enjoy my audio clip! I think it’s quite funny. Oh and just as a warning, my friends curse a bit. Who knew they could be so passionate about what to wear and what not to wear on campus?

This week I decided to play around with Timeline JS. I am fairly familiar with the other tools that Corey and I plan to use for this project. Timeline JS was the only tool that I had never used before. Luckily, the instructions were easy to follow from filling in the spread sheet to publishing and embedding the actual timeline.

I decided to create a timeline that shows the cultural and entertainment news that may have affected the way people dressed in the 1980s. Part of what Corey and researching for our project is how popular culture (specifically from MTV) affected the way people dressed in relation to their gender. The timeline I created was just a rough sketch of what our final timeline will look like. I got all the information from historyplex.com. For our final timeline I would like to find more specific dates and include more information about why these events are significant to development of fashion trends in the ’80s. For example, the song “Like a Virgin” by Madonna came out in 1985, which prompted a lot of women to start wearing long, layered necklaces and Michael Jackson popularized the red leather jacket after his “Thriller” music video came out in 1983. Likely, our final timeline will also include pictures and links to our sources.

Like I stated earlier in this post, this timeline is rough. It definitely needs some pictures and more information, but I also kind of like it without the pictures. It matches my minimalist black and white theme. Of course it isn’t very engaging as it is so the final product will definitely include visuals. Enjoy my minimalist timeline of the ’80s below!

I’ve customized many websites in the past four years. I am a serial blog creator and destroyer. I’ve only used blogger for my website customization though so this was new for me. I first decided to change the theme. I wanted something clean and minimalist. The first theme I changed my blog to was Activello. I tinkered with that theme for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to get a header image like they showed in the preview. After about 30 minutes I gave up and switched to my current them. From there I removed the sidebar, because it really isn’t necessary for this site’s goals. I then changed the header to this black and white star photo I found labeled for reuse on Google. I knew that I wanted a minimalist image and for some unexplained reason I am obsessed with stars right now so this image was perfect! I also tried changing the header color, but any color other than white doesn’t stand out against the image I chose so I changed it back to it’s original white. I think my website is better now than it was, but I’m probably going to continue to play around with it here and there when I find time to make it even better.

Corey and I are both very easy breezy people. We were both okay with any topic for our project which was both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing about it was that we had the whole world of fashion open to us. The bad thing was that having the whole world of fashion open makes it hard to narrow it down. Eventually, we did narrow it down though. We have decided to focus on the fashion of ’80s because I hate it and he loves it.  I think these conflicting views of the era will keep our project interesting to us both and will help us maintain a balanced view on the fashion at that time.

After deciding on our decade, we wanted to narrow down our topic of research further. What about the ’80s is so compelling? After our discussion in class on ’80s fashion we decided we wanted to explore the relationship between gender and clothing in ’80s fashion. We noticed that women wore shoulder pads to appear more masculine and some men grew their hair long (hair bands) which gave them a more feminine appearance. This was also a prominent time for the androgynous look. We want to explore more of these gender norm bending trends in the ’80s to understand the origins and motivations of such trends.

One thing we had to keep in mind as we narrowed down our topic is the resources we have available to do our research. I had mentioned in class that most school libraries keep an archive of old school yearbooks. We intend to look at those yearbooks to see what people in Fredericksburg, VA really wore during the ’80s because average people tend to have more subdued looks than those of the celebrities at that time.

We will also have to conduct interviews. I plan to interview my fashion history professor to get a scholar’s view on fashion in the ’80s and since he lived through the ’80s he can also give a first hand account of what he saw people wearing and what he himself wore. We will also likely talk to alums about what they wore in the ’80s and maybe even a few current students who are wearing ’80s trends today.

Fredericksburg is also rich in antique shops so perhaps we will be able to find some clothes from the ’80s in one of them to document and try on.