Blacksburg to Guatemala Archive

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2015-05-14
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Abstract

The primary objective of the Blacksburg to Guatemala Archive Project is to create a medium for cultural exchange between Christ Church, Blacksburg, and their sister parish in San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala. This project will create a website and will allow for these two parishes to remain in close contact following the recent visit of a delegation from Christ Church, Blacksburg, to Guatemala in January 2015. We are completing this project as soon as possible in order to minimize the delay between their visit and the establishment of such a cultural exchange. Both parishes will benefit from our project, satisfying a desire to remain in-touch and embrace cultural differences. We decided to use WordPress to offer the simplest possible solution. WordPress will allow the client to easily maintain stories on the website and will also give readers an easy way to enjoy them. We chose a simple theme and then further perfected it to reduce any complications. We decided to only display aspects that were absolutely necessary to the project. Aside from the stories, categories and search are the only other modules that are visible to the readers. The website also allows users to leave comments on every story so they can interact with the parishes in an easy way. Another big request from the client’s end was to allow for stories written in Spanish. We incorporated WordPress’s bilingual tools to support this functionality. Stories can be written in either language and they will be formatted appropriately. A search engine has also been implemented to display results in both English and Spanish. Overall, the website was a success. The primary focus was usability and the tests we ran proved the website was easy to use. The client was also happy with the results and can see the website being very useful to both parishes.

Description
Blacksburg2Guatemala website allows the Christ Church parishes to share stories and culture with one another. This is an easy way to archive stories that would otherwise be lost. The website can be viewed at: http://blacksburg2guatemala.wordpress.com. The separate file for the testing report (BburgGuatemalaJoshiTestingEdited.pdf) summarizes work prior to the final report.
Keywords
Blacksburg, Guatemala, cultural exchange, church website, archive
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