Wishful Gwich'in @wishfulgwichinak - Tumblr Blog

Welcome to the world!

My baby niece Henley Rose came into the world May 13, 2014 at 9 lbs 2 oz and 21 inches long. She is the most adored individual in my big crazy family right now. Every family gathering all are huddled around her oohing and ahhing over her adorableness. Love being a new aunt to this active little girl. She has grown so much, in only 5 weeks she has already started trying to swing her head around. She recognizes her parents easily and is an active sleeper.

#baby neice #true love #familytime #babycrazy

makingitinla

How I felt on every date I went on before I met my bf

wishfulgwichinak

...post by my beloved best friend. Great minds think alike.

Flooding in Alaska

The summer weather has so far been memorable for 2013. We had snow until the 3rd week of May, a week later the sun melted everything in 80 degree heat, and break up season started late in a rush.

In result, many of the villages in the interior Alaska faced flooding. Fort Yukon, where I am from didn't get hit with as much damage as thought to but a few homes were still impacted by the Yukon river ice break up. Luckily, my parents live more in the uptown area and built their cabin on stilts above ground if there ever is a big flood in Fort Yukon.

The closest village to Fort Yukon that was highly impacted by flooding was Circle City. About 14 homes were flooded and highly impacted due to flooding; few people relocated to Fairbanks and many are staying in the local school for shelter.

The most recognizable village name the past week has been Galena. The village was highly impacted by flooding due to the Yukon river break-up, to an extent that the Alaska state Governor Parnell declared it a disaster this morning. From what I understand, everyone in the village has been evacuated. Most families are staying with friends in Fairbanks or other places and many are staying at a few places that have opened their doors to evacuees seeking relief.

Today, I attended a couple meetings at Pioneer Park regarding the relief efforts being made for flood evacuees. A legislative update and thank you meeting, closed meeting for evacuees, community meeting for general information, picnic provided by TCC and Doyon, and a resource fair for evacuees took place during the day. I have been amazed with the community effort made this past week and individuals so willing to help through volunteering their time to help with relief efforts. These are the kind of things that happen in Fairbanks that make me love it even though the winters kill me. The people are so community focused.

Here the Director of Homeland Security speaks about relief efforts during the community meeting held today, May 31, 2013 at Pioneer Park.

This is the flyer I helped put together for the meetings.

#Alaska #flood #disaster #community #help #relief #village

Summer!

Web design is over and so is spring semester 2013. Unfortunately, summer semester begins with 2 upper communication courses. On the bright side, summer has finally begun after an unwanted extended winter/spring season.

This past weekend we hit our first 80 degree mark of the summer, which was surprising since it was snowing only a week early. Currently it's about 84 degrees at almost 9 PM.

Memorial Day weekend was fabulous. I traveled to Seattle last week with work and stayed an extra night to hang out with friends. We went out, ate brunch at the organic Portage Bay Cafe after about an hour and a half wait (it was well worth it), perused the infamous Pike's Market and did some shopping. I found a new boutique which I most definitely will be a future online purchasing addict to. My favorite part about the trip was seeing the flower market at Pike's. It was amazing!

Saturday night I arrived in Anchorage and went out with a few friends. It was fun but predictable. Sunday brunch at Humpy's was surprisingly good after we decided not to brave the hour wait for my favorite breakfast place in Anchorage, Snow City. I then made the mistake of browsing Nordstrom after an exchange, but I now have a beautiful new pair of coral Corso Comos ready to be worn for the summer and Ginessa's bachelorette party this fall! (P.S. This is an awkward photo but I had to show them off, I love them!)

When I arrived in Fairbanks Sunday, the sun was shining and the heat was so welcoming. Also, my baby cousin Olivia was home to greet me. We had a great time in the sun on Memorial Day at Pioneer Park with a friend and her son who just turned 2 years old. We topped the day off with shaved ice from Hot Lick's, a trip to Risse's Greenhouses and planting flowers at my grandparents' house. These are the types of days that make-up for the harsh winters in Fairbanks...amazing summer weekends!

#alaska #summer #Family #travel #fairbanks alaska

The Importance of Organization

Below is my response to the Blog Post #9 question, is organization important to good design and how?

I believe organization is very important to good design, 1. Because it makes it easier for the reader to grasp your ideas and concept of your website. 2. Because it is cosmetically pleasing for a person to look at a web design that is organized well rather than a disorganized mess that can be a sore sight for the eyes.

Organization is important for most companies that would like to relay their information to people and have it be user-friendly. The more user-friendly or reachable information is for a customer, the more likely they are going to shop with you. For example, you can see a dauntingly disorganized website here:

This is a website that you can see is all over the place at first site. Right now, my department is looking into reorganizing the website, www.doyon.com. At first look, the website seems pretty easy to see where is where, but once you actually know what you are looking for, it may not be so easy. What we have found is that when a website is developed, the original "tabs" and quick links need to be fairly open to change. As far as the tabs on the website at Doyon go, they are fairly well thought out but the problem comes to the quick links. Quick links are meant to be quick links to information for the viewer but when it comes down to it, the quick links have become increasingly disorganized because instead of adding information into the links, more links were produced.

What the website needs is a little revamping and re-thought of the organization by subject and where the customer (shareholder) would think of going for a certain subject. For example, I know that the "Shareholder Outreach" department provides many resources to shareholders and I want to find out what they provide to shareholders. When I go to the tab "shareholders" and scroll down to "shareholder outreach", all I see is information about their talent bank profile. If the site was organized well, I should be able to go to the shareholder outreach section and find a list of opportunities that Shareholder Outreach provides.

A great example of minimalistic organization is here:

#webpage #organization

Course Website/blog Goals and Inspirations

My goal for this semester was to create a website that would be useful for an organization in my hometown, Fort Yukon, Alaska. It would serve as a starting point to encourage other local organizations to use the World Wide Web as a tool to communicate to their customers and the public. My hopes were and still are to learn enough about internet authoring and design to be able to serve these organizations with their company marketing and communication efforts through web design. In change, providing a blog layout may be an option to a website for an organization.

For gwitchyaazheecorp.com, I plan to focus on the about us, services, and contact information pages. The about us will include to corporation’s board of directors, management/staff members, mission, vision, and general query. Each biography will give a few short sentences about their position on how their experience and education or how they started fit into their position. The services page will include photos of service areas (gas station and lodge) with general information regarding their purpose, place and current use as well as any other services they may provide. The contact page will include an easy form to fill out that will go directly to the page manager for any question/comment submissions as well as give the general contact information for corporate headquarters.

The websites I see as inspiration include http://www.checklandkindleysides.com/ and www.doyon.com.

Given the wire frame and layout reading, I see my pages to be navigation on top with a two-column liquid layout below. The “tabs” or subjects of focus will be on the top of the page, the sub categories will be in a drop down menu or subcategory menu to the left side and sub-category information on the rest of the page (right side).

#blogs #communication #organization

Checkland Kindleysides is an independent design consultancy, specialising in retail design, graphics, brand identity, commercial interiors and interactive design.

Wow, what an awesome design to a blog. This is exactly the type of design I would use for a company or organization to display their subsidiaries and work industries or their products and services. I like how the very top accentuates the main aspects the organization wants to relay to their audience and once you click on one of those aspects or tabs, you can see another list of tabs relating to the subject you clicked. I like that type of organization rather than the usual drop down menu which can sometimes be a hassle when you're on a mobile phone or touch pad.

Relating Checkland Kindleysides' blog to any other type of blog-website is definitely the organizational options they give compared to others. What seems to be an overhaul of various organizational options they have in their blog actually makes sense because the organization of the blog depicts the type of interactive design and brand identification they can provide for companies that seek their services. As you can see above, Checkland Kindleysides provides brand identification services through interactive design. Although incorporating so many different types of organizational options (like a historical slideshow, hyperlink listing, paragraph information listing, hyperlink by photos, awards organized by year and photos with comments) in one blog may not be a great option for some businesses, I love how they use so many photos and hyperlinks to more information in understandable and neat layouts.

#web design #interactiveblogs #marketing #informational

Survey and making my own form using JotForm!

My experience with JotForm was great. It was easy to use and I encourage others to use as a simple survey and form tool for other sites. Using this has inspired me to contact an organization I know that desperately needs it for their scholarship submissions. I love how this another option compared to using the dreaded Microsoft Access...from someone who does not use it often at all. I'm glad I was introduced to a new source that I can see being used by a lot of different organizations.

#usefulsources #forms #DIY

Join me in celebrating the success of the 2013 Raven's Ball fundraiser for the Healthy Alaska Natives Foundation by learning more and donating!

Changing My Blog Theme

I have changed my blog theme. As you can see, it went from:

This was the original theme given by Tumblr. I chose to change my theme to the Minimalist theme here:

I know, I know. It's not too much of a difference, but I really am a minimalist at heart, as far as decorative themes go.

As far as I'm concerned, this was one of the easiest ways to apply a theme to "my" site. I've applied themes in the not-so-distant-past for MySpace but it definitely was not as easy as Tumblr's method. MySpace used HTML as their method of applying themes outside of their standardized and very little choice option in the site. Tumblr had many to choose from. Although, if I wasn't given the link to the list of themes, I'm not sure it would have been so easy. Nevertheless, here I am with my new easy breezy theme!

#assignment #themes

Here is an interesting blog that a friend of mine posted on Facebook. It's written by a Koyukon Athabascan who discusses learning from our Elders which is a valued Athabascan tradition.

Open Source Programs (Assignment blog post)

One open source software program I’ve downloaded and had used pretty frequently in the past is IrfanView. It’s a photo editing program that allows size change, color editing, filters, cropping, and exporting to different viewing. I also use it to scan images from my printer. I like it because it is super user-friendly. Everything is straightforward. The downside to it, is that is a pretty old software program and the filters and framings to photos are limited. I would rather have a program that let me add frame whether they are photos are edge changers/faders, etc. I believe that Irfanview is a better program for those new to photo editing, but there are better programs out there, that are open source (free) and easy to use once you get a handle on it.

One web design related open source program that would be nice to try is KompoZer. I like the fact that it has some pretty acceptable reviews overall. It is even recommended as an “excellent” web design editor by the CNET Editor’s rating. It seems like it’s a pretty good program for HTML editing, but some reviewers say that it changed their HTML coding around a lot after use. It looks as if most of the bad reviews were from very experience HTML coders but is recommended by CNET for less professional but new users.

You can find the CNET review by clicking here.

Find the KompoZer web design editor download here.

#homework #open source #free #web design