Hello everyone! Thought I would get everyone up to date on what has been going on here on my end of the line! I spent most of last week getting oriented and outlining how I am going to approach my project. My job is to create a website promoting the marine sciences here at Oregon State University. I created an outline for how the website would be organized and then met with Jenna Borberg to determine whether or not I was on the right track. I struggled a little bit to figure out what the focus should be for this site, but after meeting with Jenna I came to the conclusion that I am going to make research features a top priority. I spent the rest of the week reading the content of the latest Terra magazine for ideas about what to include in the site. I have created a ROUGH outline of what categories the site might include. I used DrupalGardens to do this, but I am planning to attend a Drupal training session in a week or two because I still have a lot to learn about web design and management. To see the categories I hope to include in the site you can visit:

http://marinescience.drupalgardens.com/

This week I hope to read up on current projects going on in all of the departments and institutes represented in the Marine Council. I will then compile a list of potential researchers to feature. I hope to meet with Pat Kight later in the week to get her feedback before I pursue emailing people about interviews. I anticipate spending a good chunk of time working on writing new features, finding existing features to pull from, and creating short 30 second readable news feed items. Outreach, education, and an events calendar will be the second tier of items I will focus on.

Hope everybody has a fun and productive week!

~Shealyn Friedrich