rocketathletics.com

 

Jesse Allen
Jesse Allen
Webmaster January 2011 - May 2013
The End.
I entered this program the second semester of my sophomore year after I had expressed my interest in working on the website to Mr. Wright. This was a great time for me to join on as rocketathletics.com was launched the semester before. Initially, I spent my first several weeks teaching myself how to use Adobe Dreamweaver. After I familiarized myself with the software I began to actively work on the website. I started out updating schedules, results, and flash rosters. My junior year I primarily worked on the photo gallery pages, among these other tasks. At the end of my junior year, I had the crazy idea of stepping up and trying to fill the shoes left by Tyler Knight to write the sports articles featured under our Athletic News section of the home page. This was a difficult challenge for myself as my knowledge of most sports was limited outside of soccer. My sports knowledge and my ability to write articles based on very little information has undoubtedly expanded over this year. A couple of large projects I have worked on are the recreation and updating of the College Signings page and the redesigning and remapping of the Opponent Map. Besides these, I have created multiple other projects in Flash and Photoshop at Mr. Wright’s request or whenever I felt innovative. Throughout the two and a half years I have been a part of this web team, I have had the pleasure of working with Nick Bishop, Trevor Weilert, Tyler Knight, Tim Cage, Jordan Reed, Kayla Collins, Haley Canfield, and Ryan Parkey. This has been an exciting and educating experience as I have learned more than I ever imagined about athletics, writing, web design, HTML, and then taking what you’re given and making it work. Thanks to anyone who has taken the time to read this and any other previous articles I have written. I will certainly miss this class as I move on in life. I plan to go to Butler Community College for my associate’s degree in their Digital Media program, then move on to a four-year college, and then hopefully find a job I enjoy in a related field. It has been fun; I cannot believe that this is the end.
I can't believe it's over...
I had the fortunate opportunity at the start of my Junior year to help work on rocketathletics.com and become part of the staff. By the end of my high school career, I had taken every single class available from Mr. Wright, so he knew that I was a hard worker and welcomed my entrance. During my first semester as a Senior, I had Mr. Wright 5 times a day, and I spent generally 2 of those hours working on the website, during 1st hour I would go collect the photos that needed to be ran for the website, and during 4th hour I would update the website with my fellow classmates. I worked beside Tyler Knight, Jesse Allen, Jordan Reed, and Kayla Collins throughout my year and a half working on the website. Even though I graduate at semester, I plan on coming back during the start of the next semester to help train the two new recruits, as we will have many sports waiting for them when they arrive. This class is one of the best things that happened throughout high school for me, as it forced me to learn as I go and make the best of what has happened. We have made a few changes to the website while I was here, we had to change our hosting company, and between Jesse Allen and me we updated the homepage and its parts from Adobe CS3 to Adobe CS5. Each of these problems brought headaches to the group, the hosting company we were with flagged us down for having too much traffic, as it slowed down their servers and caused disruptions for other people, and so Mr. Wright had to track down a company who was willing to host our website. The problem with changing from CS3 to CS5 is that it wasn’t a simple transition; the two weren’t compatible. We had to individually remake each page, luckily it had been done before so we had some references to look at while we stumbled through making each page, and each page had some sort of update in CS5 that we had to learn so we could finish the page. This class has been one of the most rewarding classes I have taken, and you don’t even need to know much about any of the programs to join, as long as you are willing to work you’ll be taught everything you need to know, I know this because I knew nothing about the Adobe programs when I joined, and know I feel like I have a much better understanding of how they work. I hope that future members of this small class get as much out of it as I have, and I hope they enjoy working on their tasks, however frustrating they may get at times. I plan on attending Butler next semester to get my Gen Eds out of the way, and then attending their new gaming program that starts next year.
Tim Cage
Tim Cage
Webmaster August 2011 - December 2012