Overview

Armed with an education in communications, marketing, programming, and business, and motivated by an ongoing passion for the web, URLyGrl can help you make sense of technology, culture, software engineering, eBusiness, online education, organizational behavior, online channel of communication, building relationships, marketing, strategic alliances, and much more.

Online Medium

Internet Learning Systems will no more replace human interaction than the telephone will. An online education is much more than a glorified self-study. The internet is an additional channel for human interaction. Discussions, knowledge sharing, and even text books are enhanced by the online environment.

Hyperlinks are in deed still the best thing since sliced bread! Why? If you take the electornic version of your favorite text books and teaching manuals, re-create them in platform-independent document format(Linux? Mac? Microsoft? No problem.), and add links to all your references and related material. Want your student to be able to research a particular topic in more depth? Provide a link to the related website right in your text book. When the student clicks the link up pops their favorite browser and opens up the material you, as educator, recommended.

With today's world of Gen-X and Gen-Y, kid-in-a-candy-shop ADD mis-types, students will still want and need your guidance as an educator. Words are only part of the picture. Words can be ambiguous, or misinterpreted. Pictures help, but teachers guide!

Website Management

Understanding your user, gathering requirements, proposing options, selecting changes, creating expanded site structures, writing web copy, executing the changes, planning the release, migrating to production, and monitoring responses by the web community are all part of a days work in the life of a website content manager. As a project coordinator and business analyst, I determine which expansion options exist, communicate those to Product Marketing Management

On Web Design

Author Jennifer Niederst discusses several of the disciplines of "web design" in her book, Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HtML, Graphics, and Beyond (O'Reilly 2001-2003).

Understand that people who build and maintain websites come from a number of disciplines. Some were marketers or graphic artists for the print world, some were business analysts in the information technology world. In fact, as accessible to the general public as web site creation is, people come from all discplines - engineers, doctors, horticulturists, and more.

Ms. Niederst addresses two disciplines that are the closest to my experience - information design and interface design. My early days were maintaining existing tables-based code complete with JavaScript rollovers, and no matter how well I could build my own tables from scratch, it was just dull without more than average PhotoShop experience. Despite my graphic design theory class in college, without the in-depth Photoshop tool experience, I was just another klutz! CSS changed all that. Or at least it CAN. ;-)

In fact, moving beyond the tiny bits of CSS I have done since the early 2000s, understanding the DOM structure, validation of stylesheets and XHtML structure, I've learned this is a significant niche.

History

Over eighteen years in information technology and information systems provides a broad foundation. A year assessing the compliance levels of all i.t. application development business processes for financial applications provides insight. Nearly nine years of consulting on a variety of projects provides the skills and awareness to deliver the requirements, design, documentation, and implementation planning your technology and business teams need to deliver value.

Documentation / tech Writing

Over nine years of business analysis and time in business school has provided considerable opportunity to write. From functional requirements gathering to writing instructions for the system user or system administrator, to illustrating high-level processes, URLyGrl.com has the diverse expertise to make it happen for you. Audit trails are the record keeping of doing business. Capturing what's been done or how it works or what is desired will help you and your teams remember when it becomes critical. Please compliance auditors too.

Tools / Skills

Project Methodology

Documentation Development