Final Website Post

            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.