How R2T2 is organized

The main components of Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens are divided into two categories:

• Specific ways to help young people
  • These are the "Use Your…" sections. They offer concrete ways you can help, based on your strengths and resources.

• Particular kinds of adults and how they can positively impact tweens' and teens' lives.
  • These are the "Ideas For…" sections. They offer actionable ways you can help based on the role you play in a young person's life.

Within each of these sections, you'll find a couple sentences or a few short paragraphs with some initial information, which will almost always include embedded links to helpful resources.

You will also often find links to a list of additional resources in each section. Those resources are usually listed alphabetically, unless there's one that's more important or helpful than the others, in which case that one will be listed first.

The "About" section has some details about Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens, including an FAQ, the glossary, and a little bit about Shannon, the site's creator.

"Level-Setting" contains important background information -- first on what sex, gender, and sexuality are and, second, on this political moment in the US. If you're new to queer and trans communities and movements in this country, these pages are an excellent place to start.

And "Special Notes for Queer Tweens & Teens" has a letter i've written to each group, as well as an invitation for LGBTQA+/SGL adults to submit their own messages to our young people.

Other sections of this website offer additional resources for adults and young people -- everything from books to webtoons to information about religious communities.

You'll also find a description of my survey and "What Young People Want You To Know," which has many of the thoughts shared by the survey-takers -- some of which you'll also see in blue call-out boxes throughout this website, including on this page.

You'll also see a "Hot Topics" link in the main R2T2 menu. This section pulls together the pages that focus on some of the most discussed topics around queer and trans young people, such as sex and sexuality, bullying, and TGNC young people's access to medical care.

These topics are also linked multiple other places on this website.

You’ll find a “safety exit” button on the bottom right of your screen at all times. If you need to hide being on R2T2, clicking this button will take you immediately to Google.

Note, however, that it won't delete your browsing history. You'll find instructions on doing that in "How to Clear Your History in Any Browser."

You'll be able to access the navigation menu for Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens on the top of each page.

The top-left of each window will always display a button to the glossary and a page with crisis resources.

You'll find that each page has a tag cloud at the bottom, as well as a categories drop-down list. I've tagged and categorized every page of R2T2 based not only on the written content but also any photos that appear there. These components may allow you to more easily find the content you're looking for, especially if you want something specific.

You'll notice that the categories list is hierarchical, with "parent" and "child" categories (e.g., "age" is a parent category, and its children include "Gen Xers," "Millennials," and "Zoomers.") You can also find a list of all R2T2 categories, alphabetized, on this page.

By comparison, tags aren't hierarchical. But the size of each word in the word cloud indicates how frequently it's used, with larger words appearing more frequently. The bottom of each page shows R2T2's 50 most-used tags.

In both cases, clicking on a particular word or phrase will take you to a list of all pages that contain it.

You may notice that my tags and categories are very similar. This is not the way they're usually used, but there's utility in this approach for R2T2. There are a few cases where a word appears as only a category or tag and not as the other. But those are rare -- and it's something i discovered way too late to want to go back through each webpage to add a missing category or tag (ugh).

I discovered, both in creating this site, as well as hanging out with some younger queer and trans folx, that sometimes "gay" is used as a generic term, much like i use "queer." This surprised me because i'd never noticed this in anything other than the phrase "gay marriage" and because using words meant for men as a generic is problematic (e.g., "mankind" used to refer to people of all genders).

So, here, i've created two categories/tags: one specifically for people who identify as gay ("gay boys/men") and one i've labeled " 'gay' as generic term" for the other. Sometimes, it was clear which one i needed. When it wasn't, i've used both categories/tags on a page. My apologies for any time i got this wrong.

As a last note on categories and tags, i coded these manually, which means that i undoubtedly missed some -- either because i didn't realize i needed one or because i thought i hit <Save> when i hadn't.

Finally, there's also a word-search function (indicated by the spyglass at the end of the menu), where you can search for every instance of, for example, the word "bisexual." The tags and categories may include results without a particular word but where the topic is nonetheless covered, whereas the search function will allow you to limit results to those containing a certain word.

These two tags/categories deserved some special attention.

Since most of the content on R2T2 is about teenagers, you'll find the "teens" tag/category used only in instances where there is content that i want to call out specifically for/about them (e.g., the related "special note"); otherwise, every page would be categorized/tagged with "teens," making it useless.

Tweens, on the other hand, are tagged/categorized everywhere they appear, which is much less frequently than teens. It's not that the other pages don't contain material relevant to tweens. But tagging/categorizing in this way will make it easier for R2T2 visitors to find tween-focused content.

I'm using "SGL/same-gender loving" similarly. I've generally only used "SGL" as a tag or category if the page specifically mentions folx who identify as SGL. So while i use "LGBTQA+/SGL" throughout R2T2 in my text, i'm not tagging/categorizing with "SGL" everywhere that acronym appears.

The one exception to that is where my survey-takers have used it. I'd guess that most of the time one of them wrote something like "LGBTQA+/SGL," they were mimicking my wording. But i'm not sure of that. So, in those instances, i erred on the side of tagging/categorizing with "SGL."

I want to add that i am not a web developer. Or a user experience expert. Or a web design person. Or even a computer geek.

I've learned a ton about how to navigate WordPress in the making of this site. But i have so much more than i'll never learn (like CSS, which i have zero desire to delve into). Also there's so much functionality out there that i have no idea how to use because it's way past my tech capacity.

So Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens is way less flashy and beautiful than it might otherwise be. I hope you'll stay and check out the content anyway.

Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens can be accessed on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. The website template I've used has layouts for all of those, and i've used them to test every page.

But there are so many variations on screen sizes and resolutions that the company doesn't guarantee the site will look or function equally well on all mobile devices.

R2T2 looks by far the best on desktops, laptops, and tablets. So if you have the option of using one of those, please do.  You'll have a more visually pleasing and better organized experience!

Closely related to me not being a developer (see immediately above) is my attempt to make this website accessible for people who are blind, have low vision, or need accessibility for other reasons. This is not an easy thing to do with my (lack of) skills!

One of the main draws of the website template i selected for Reflecting Rainbow Tweens & Teens is that it claims to be fully accessible -- and that generally seems to be pretty true.

Selecting other components was a challenge since most plugins, which add functionality to WordPress websites, aren't created with accessibility in mind. There were things i would have loved to have done that i opted against for this very reason -- like interesting ways of organizing the main website menus.

I also don't have a budget for this website and was unemployed three times while working on it. So i couldn't (and still can't) hire a web accessibility person to go through every page to check (and fix) things. However, i did work with that amazing Josh Warren-White. He helped me on all the parts of this site that i'm not smart enough to do, including lots of accessibility-related things, which he has extensive experience with.

I also have a couple accessibility-related plugins, including a back-end one that helps show accessibility issues, as well as a user-end one (in the top-left corner of every screen) that helps visitors alter some of R2T2's aesthetics to make it more accessible. The former, while thorough and helpful, is often difficult for a non-techie to interpret (thanks, Josh!). Fortunately, the latter was pretty quick and simple to set up.

Some parts of web accessibility are easily in my control, like offering alt text for all the images or adding hyperlinks to descriptive text and not just linking to the word "here." I've gotten better at these but am still honing those skills.

Other things are even easier, like using a sans serif font and ensuring its large enough, as well as making sure the text and background are sufficiently contrasting. In these areas, at least, i'm pretty sure i've succeeded -- although even these things have nuance that i'm likely not taking account of.

However, there may still be parts of R2T2 that remain inaccessible, for which i offer my deepest apologies and none of which are Josh's fault. If you find something and feel inspired to write me through my main contact form, i'd be deeply grateful and will do my best to fix the problem.

A final thought:

C'mon, WordPress-related web developers! Let's make things easier for non-techie people like me to build accessible websites.