In addition to being Earth Day, April 22 was also Take Your Daughter to Work Day. So after school (it was just too exciting of a day to miss,) I picked up my daughter Gina, 7, and she joined me for an afternoon at Hivehaus, the creative collective where I have an office.
Since I am an interactive copywriter, Gina was going to join me for a day of wireframing and creating content for a website. First, we had to decide the subject of her site. She chose Cleopatra, one of her enduring obsessions.
Then she faced the realities of domain names. Cleopatra? Taken. Egypt? Taken.
So we settled on CleopatrasEgypt.wordpress.com
Then Gina and I discussed what pages she wanted and came up with:
Home | Alexandria | Egyptian Art | Games | Love Life
Gina wanted to use icons for navigation. But I told her that would have to be a Phase 2 sort of thing. (Way beyond my technical knowledge.)
Then Gina did a white board sketch for a homepage.
Originally, Gina wanted to include flash games on the Games page. Once again, I told her that might be a lot to do in an afternoon. I told her we could include links to games on other sites. Gina didn't agree, she said that would be disappointing for someone and didn't want to send them away to another site. So we settled on describing Cleopatra's favorite game.
Gina dictated all of the content. She wrote it from the point of view of Cleopatra. Even the homepage copy said:
I am Cleopatra, I am the Queen of all Egypt. This is my home on the Mediterranean seaport of Alexandria.
She was pretty consistent with that POV through the whole site. It made for some interesting content. She also selected the photos she wanted to use.
Of course, we also had to go to Java Jones, because getting hot chocolate is very important to the creative process. It was great fun and gave my daughter a better idea what my working days are like and it will be a pretty nifty item for show and tell at school.
You can visit Cleopatra: Queen of Egypt in all its wordpress.com template glory here.