Hopefully
my website will be finished by tonight but I do plan on using it to promote
myself. I had a LiveJournal for the longest time and never got any traffic on
it so I’m very excited to have a website that actually has a chance at traffic.
Firstly, I think that having a
website to put on business cards and as a contact will be a beneficial way to
promote myself as well as a good way to make me sound official. It’s one thing
to but published on a site but it’s another thing entirely to run your own
site. I feel more professional
already! Hopefully, tying my website in with my facebook and twitter will get
it some traffic as well.
My
social media projects have definitely helped me to write my website. Firstly,
they have taught me to write in a simple language. Secondly, my experience on
Twitter has taught me that people mostly skim through posts so the shorter I
can say something the better. Likewise, my experience on facebook has taught me
that graphics, pictures and designs will make my website stand out to the
viewer. The more enticing visually I can make a website the better.
The
final way my social media projects have helped in the creation of this site is
linking. Being able to but a link to my social media sites is a lot safer than
linking my phone number or personal address. I’m very glad we made professional
social media sites as well so no one sees any embarrassing photos as well. Also in the social media active age we
are in having multiple social media tags seems to make websites seem more
legitimate and employees or people seem more reachable.
My
experience making the website has been really interesting to say the least. As
of me writing this my website isn’t completed yet but I can tell you what I
have learned so far.
Firstly,
photoshop is a great designing tool. I always seem to forget how useful and
easy photoshop is. I used photoshop not only to sketch out my first drafts for
my website but also to bring my plans into dreamweaver. I found this extremely
interesting and helpful.
As
for the actual designs for my website I used a minimalist concept that was the
brainchild of both my laziness and the actual design articles we read on our
blog. I tried to keep the color scheme simple as well so I went with a black
and white theme. I did this to make my website look a little like a notebook.
Content
wise, I focused on writing for my portfolio. I tried to show that I could write
in a diverse amount of styles. I included some of my schoolwork as well as
creative writings and scripts for commercials.
I
spent an entire class making images out of my creative writing pieces so I hope
that it really looks nice visually in the final website because I spent a lot
of time in photoshop. I did this to all of my pieces so that they could be
viewed as an image and can’t be edited or copied by another party. I also did
this because I know how much more convenient looking at an image is compared to
downloading the PDF file.
For
the background texture I tried to choose interesting visuals that were at the
same time subtle enough to not distract the viewer. I chose a metallic black
texture for the background, a crumpled paper texture for the banner and a soft
Victorian style fabric texture for the navigation bar. I hope these textures won’t overpower
the overall visual experience of the website but I dulled down the colors so
hopefully that will balance out the images.
Dreamweaver
I found to be an extremely confusing program. I thought I understood coding
when I used it to create my BUFF Wiki page but in dreamweaver everything
changed. The coding became even harder because now I had to not only position
the text on the page but also position the text on the page over a background
and make sure it was readable.
The
one thing I seemed good at was creating hotspots, at least until the properties
toolbox disappeared. With dreamweaver it is essential that you name everything
something simple and easy to remember because you will likely be forced to type
that file in several times exactly the same way so that the software knows
exactly what file you need. This sounds easy on paper but when you have several
photoshop images and have to replace the several times for a project you can
lose track of what you’re doing really fast.
There
was a huge confusion with something called DivTags. Thankfully, we were able to
avoid this monster by making out files images and slapping the text onto the
image.
Then
there was the whole nightmare of making the background image stay the same size
on the portfolio page. I still don’t understand what I was doing there but my
image was 960 X600 pixels hopefully it counts for something.
I
found the software obnoxiously confusing. I felt really bad for our professor
who had to walk around and help of with every unfortunate thing dreamweaver
tried to put us through.
At
every single task it seemed dreamweaver had another problem or just wanted to
stop working altogether. I don’t know if this is the fault of the actual
program or simply the computers we were working off of. The computers we used
had a bad habit of quitting on us as well. Photoshop in particular decided to
just stop functioning at a couple of points when I was working on it.
I
hope what I want for my website comes through. The more experience I have with
dreamweaver the less of a chance I feel like I have.
