I finalized the nuts and bolts of my website, wrapped up my research for the vignettes (for now), and finished a draft of my first vignette (of three) this week. To get the look and feel I wanted for the vignette links on the homepage, I had to manually add some HTML to make the images work as links and then modify the template with some custom CSS to add a mouseover effect that made them look more like links. Some internet searches gave me most of the background I needed to make those changes without too much trouble. I found this website on CSS particularly helpful.

The vignette I drafted is mostly an ArcGIS StoryMap that I embedded in a page. That means it doesn’t look exactly the same as the rest of the content, but it’s close. It also means some of the scrolling behavior isn’t as smooth as I’d like, but I think it’s better to keep users in the main website rather than forward them elsewhere and loose the menus and other site elements.

I also roughed in pages for the other two vignettes to get a sense of what I could do with them visually. Next up, I’ll finish writing the vignettes and find supporting images for them.