By the end of the second week of my internship I think I’ve started to get a little used to being in Japan. The previously bizarre customs and formalities due to the cultural shock of being in japan have started to become more familiar occurrences for me. My uptake of the language has also been going great. I’ve learned so much in the time  since my arrival because very few people speak English. This week, I continued doing work on the Osaka Photonics Initiative. This week was crucial for the entire movement because we need to figure out exactly what we hope to accomplish with the initiative so we can focus our efforts. After a few meetings and discussions, we decided that the movement would focus on Teachers, Students, Community and Industry. As a resource for teachers it would give them the tools to teach photonics in their classroom and inform them on the importance of photonics. As a resource for students, we want it to teach them about the growing field of photonics and give them the opportunity to get involved through photonic projects, events or OSA/SPIE student chapters. As a resource for community, we want to let government and citizens now about what photonics is and how it is both ecofriendly and creating a lot of jobs. As a resource for Industry, we hope to educate companies that using photonics is a great idea because it is a cheap and ecofriendly alternative to a lot of more harmful sciences. These ideas have become the foundation for the project.

I used my experience in Illustrator and Photoshop in order to develop some possible logos for the movement but in the end we decided that we were just going to use the school’s crest because we decided that we wanted the school to benefit from the traffic that will frequent the website. I began creating the template for the website. The template included the navigation bar, the body, the head banner and the site map at the bottom. I created the template by utilizing my knowledge of Bootstrap’s grid system. Bootstrap was my tool of choice for the project because it is extremely modern and compatible with mobile devices. In order to make the web page even more robust and professional, I spent a lot of time learning and implementing media queries that will detect the screen size and then show exclusive content for different devices. After I finished the initial version of the template, I had to spend a lot of time on bug fixes and small adjustments to padding and margins. Once the first version of the template was done I meet with my supervisors to go over the template and changes. After receiving feedback, I went ahead and made the necessary changes. Once a finalized version of the template was created, I started the development of the homepage. I wanted the home page to be great for a few reasons. The first one is that the homepage is page that will receive the highest amount of traffic. The second part is the homepage is the most important page for user retention. If the homepage is strong the user will stay and if it’s weak the user is more likely to leave. I decided to go with a block design where each block is a featured article. I thought this design would be hip and cool because the HD images would make the site look futuristic and high end. In order to implement the block system I had to spend a lot of time learning and working with Image manipulation. I got a good version of the homepage working but it still needs some more time to be prepared for launch.