The hardest part of the semester was figuring out how to make an interactive map. I was not able to complete my first interactive maps until two weeks after the due date. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how to download the data. Then, when I looked, they were oversized, and after I figured that out, the margins were off. For one of my maps, I discovered that I had misnamed the points on one of my maps. I struggled to adjust the points to what I wanted them to be. Formatting these maps also proved to be difficult. Whether it was placement, margins, or size they just did not want to fit, and it took me a while to get my interactive maps to where I wanted them.

The part I probably did best was website design. My design was very simple, and the formatting turned out to be much simpler than I anticipated. I surprisingly did not have to mess around with the font. The website had consistent margins, and it was very easy to adjust the location and amount of blocks. I also found it very easy to delete unnecessary blocks. And I found that writing and copying and pasting into blocks was much easier than I thought it would be. Something that I expected to be incredibly difficult but turned out to be incredibly easy was adding or subtracting from a block that I already created. The only thing with the website that was less than ideal was accessing the website. Accessing the website was not easy and I don’t know how I would’ve found it if I hadn’t saved the link to the admin page in a google doc.

I hated fixing mistakes within the interactive maps. I found Arcgis to be very inflexible and not very forgiving. I had to delete one interactive map and create another because of one mistake. And I found the HTML very hard to fix. I did not get a full understanding of how HTML works until the very end of the semester. Even now, I don’t feel comfortable fixing HTML. Another frustrating element was that the edit page and the public page were not always in sync. Another frustrating trait was trying to customize the page. I found it very difficult to customize the colors that they meshed with all the blocks. Eventually, I gave up and accepted that there would be a few blocks where the color didn’t mesh that great.

On the research side of things, I found trying to figure out what was public and what was private hard to figure out. Sometimes, I wanted to use a source, but I couldn’t because I needed permission and the author didn’t have a personal page or didn’t leave an email I could reach out to. I was forced to assume that the page was private and had to find another source. Fortunately, my topic was well-researched and there were often many articles that covered the same topic.