1. 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.)
2. The Original Landing Page for the Help Documents
http://help.atlas.illinois.edu/kb/
3. 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/
4. 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/
5. 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/
7. 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
8. Pictured here is the converted ‘Initial Profile Setup’ page, now with additional information.
https://answers.uillinois.edu/page.php?id=61585
9. 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:
10. 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.
