Portfolio - Alexander Richardson at ATLAS Web Services

Work Samples:

Pictured below are the original webpages I was asked to convert to a new format with each of

their corresponding links. (Due to my work, this website will be getting retired shortly. If you

attempt to follow any of the links and find that they are dead, apologies. Hopefully the pictures

will suffice.)

The Original Landing Page for the Help Documents

http://help.atlas.illinois.edu/kb/

The ATLAS Directory page. Each of the apps listed in the previous image link through to a

webpage just like this one, with help documents for more specific purposes.

http://help.atlas.illinois.edu/kb/web/atlasdirectory/

A closer look at a subset of ATLAS Directory documents. These documents were directed

specifically for Department Members. (The most general user of ATLAS Directory)

http://help.atlas.illinois.edu/kb/web/atlasdirectory/

Here is an example of one of the help documents shown above, ‘Initial Profile Setup’. In the

following images I will detail how I converted the previous pages and this one.

http://help.atlas.illinois.edu/kb/web/atlasdirectory/initial/

The KnowledgeBase homepage, where all of my converted documents can be found.

https://answers.uillinois.edu/

After converting all of the documents over to the KnowledgeBase, I then created a landing page

specifically for ATLAS Directory, similar to the Directory page detailed above.

https://answers.uillinois.edu/page.php?id=62600

Pictured here is the converted ‘Initial Profile Setup’ page, now with additional information.

https://answers.uillinois.edu/page.php?id=61585

Explanation:

I have selected these samples because they are the result of all my hours at ATLAS.

When I was first met with my supervisor in January, I was told that the end goal for the semester

would be to retire the old help website and transfer all relevant documents over to the new

knowledge database system. After a couple weeks of familiarizing myself with the system and

cataloging the original website, I set about converting all of the help documents.

This process included thoroughly reading the original documents, both for content and

typographical errors. As I began to go through the documents, it was not that uncommon to find

many blatantly misspelled words or instances of incorrect grammatical structure. After first

cleaning up these basic kinds of syntax errors, I set about editing content. I found many of the

documents to be dense or confusing, as they were written by the original developers of the

various apps being used. They were written in a very developer friendly language. Essentially,

they were not very accessible to end users, the people typically having issues with the program.

So my work was to find the middle ground between what the developer wanted to say and what

makes the most sense to a layman potentially unfamiliar with the intricacies of computers.

Another element I had to take into consideration was the addition of pictures to the

original help documents. Many of the original help documents included some pictures, but many

were unhelpful or alternatively, out of date. Due to the constant need of updates for these internal

applications, many of the applications had been altered since these documents were originally

written. Therefore, I had to reach out to the developers of these apps and request admin access to

each of them, so that way I could:

a) Fact check that the help documents were still up-to-date and relevant

and

b) Update any images that were no longer helpful

Once I had updated all of the pictures and double checked that all of the information on these

conversions was accurate, I proceeded to uploading them to the KnowledgeBase.

After I was done editing for content, I then transferred the documents over to the

KnowledgeBase admin system. From there, I had to do some very basic HTML editing to adjust

formatting for a new webpage. For the most part I just needed to do some basic HTML linking

and hyperlinking between relevant documents. I then uploaded each document, one by one, until

all of the documents that needed conversion were published and live for people to access on the

KnowledgeBase.

My final task with ATLAS Apps was, after completing the conversions, to create landing

pages for each of the internal apps and programs that there were help documents for. This

process consisted of first figuring out what types of users each app was relevant to (i.e. admins,

managers, faculty, etc.). After that, I then organized each set of documents accordingly, and then

created a new page where each of these documents could be linked to. An example of one of

these pages that I created is linked above along with an image showing what it looks like.