• by thiana , January 22, 2009

This week I was trained to update a page on the university’s website concerning scholarships. I work as a personal secretary to a wonderful woman who helps students search out and apply for scholarships. As part of my duties, I have to make sure the website is up to date and that there are no dead links.

This seemed like such a daunting task to me, one who has never even considered how websites come into existence or are maintained. I assumed it would be a lot of technical jargon and that I would come out of the training feeling like I’d been hit over the head with a hammer and would spend the rest of the semester avoiding the computer like the plague.

Surprisingly, though, I caught on pretty quickly. Sitecore, the program that we’re using now is very self explanatory and more intuitive than Office 2007. I have no idea how to create a new page, but luckily that’s not what I’ll need to be doing.

During the frustrating “information session” required last week, I learned about information architecture (IA), and my organized mind decided that my little corner of website needed a formalized checklist of pages and links that need to be maintained and updated. It’s taking a lot of organization to keep up with this new office setting, but my organizing nature is catching up to the disorder of boxes and illegible notes.