Social Studies Exemplars

Exemplars - Social Studies cover page

Website: tki.org.nz (site has since been redesigned) - view screenshot

Size: 120 pages

Government status: Government Ministry

My professional status: contractor at CWA New Media

Website client: Ministry of Education

Dates: November 2004

Categories: Website designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, CSS-based layout, eZ Publish, Government websites, Medium sites

Brief: to take the content from each of the Social Studies Exemplars online and make it into a Freehand document, following an existing template. To then turn these Freehand documents into PDFs and link to these from the SS website.

This site was housed within the main TKI template. As such it was subject to the same rules for templating as the rest of TKI, which was written in XHTML/XML and used CSS-only formatting.

My responsibilities included:

  • Taking the content from each exemplar and laying it out in the Freehand template in the most logical and space-efficient way possible
  • Extensive proof-reading to ensure that each XHTML page was exactly replicated in the Freehand file
  • Creation of PDFs from the Freehand files (keeping below a maximum filesize)
  • Linking to the PDFs from within the appropriate pages on the website (XHTML).

This was a careful and painstaking project, to ensure that every PDF was exactly the same as the original webpage. I noted a few inconsistencies between web pages along the way, which I fixed up as well. I worked as part of a two-person team, so we kept a close record of progress to ensure we did not duplicate each other's work. I enjoyed being able to proof-read and do quality control as I went along - we found it saved a great deal of time in the long run.