Final Paper Post

The website will be used to promote myself and my work through the content on the site. Since this is a professional website, I have put in samples of my work such as videos that I've created, creative and journalistic writing, and other work that I have done throughout my college career so far. I have also posted my resume on the site as well. Posting my resume on my website will show people what I have done throughout my high school and college career. This will give people a sample of what I'm capable of doing, what my strong points are, and how well I am experienced with different programs and mediums such as video and social media outlets. In order to make myself successful and gain an audience, I feel that a website with my credentials will promote and help me in future endeavors. Through the contact section of my page, I have the social media websites that I'm a part of for my social media links. I put the Facebook, Twitter, and BlogSpot that we used for the class projects into the section. I also put my personal Tumblr in as well. With these links, people can view what I have done on social media sites. For example, when we worked on the Facebook project. I created three group pages on Facebook for companies that didn't have a Facebook. This would show employers how I can create and manage groups and pages. Another example is the Twitter project. Through the Twitter project, it showed how I can tweet and keep up with instantaneous messaging as this is what Twitter is all about. The social media projects tie in with the website because it shows employers that you have an understanding of how social media works. Since I'm a journalism major, most journalism jobs require that you have experience with social media, especially Facebook and Twitter. These are the two social media sites that people are receiving their news since journalists use them to post articles and other links on the web. Knowledge about social media is key since many employers recommend that employees have experience with using these websites. Also, social media is a way for people to communicate and network with each other. With the social media links on my website, it will be easier for viewers to contact me through the sites if they have any questions. As far as designing the website, it was very rocky. Before we did anything on the computers, we first sketched out what we wanted our websites to look like. I chose to do something simple because I didn't want to overwhelm myself with fancy details and graphics. Drawing the pages out really helped me visualize what I wanted on my site. It became tedious to draw as it all started to look the same, but I'm glad that I had made a visual to look at. From there, I transferred my design onto Photoshop. Then, we inserted the images that we made in Photoshop and placed them in Dreamweaver. I thought that you would just be able to plug it in and go from there, but it was way more complicated than that. If anything, some of the steps were tedious and you had to do them for every page. For example, making the hotspots. The hotspots were probably the easiest thing to do when we were starting to build the site and make our links clickable out of all the steps that we had to go through. I had a hard time with it in the beginning because I was making small mistakes with them. At first, I messed up because I set everything up on the home page. I didn't go to each direct page and type in where the link was supposed to go. Each of the pages that I clicked on directed me to the homepage, which I did not want to happen. Or some of them didn't even go to the correct page; they weren't clickable. Then, I had to go and redo some of the pages because they were going to the homepage. Finally, I realized that for each of the pages where you set up the hotspots, you had to type in .html at the end of it. I had spent so much time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong; I even worked on this in the library. I also stayed after class to work on redoing the links for the website. I thought that I was doing the right thing, but I kept on making the same mistakes. Mistakes were easy to make while working on this project. One little thing could ruin your whole website, so you had to be very careful with what you were doing. I think a lot of people in the class missed that part, so we had a little trouble with one of the easiest things as far as setting up the links. It was hard to determine what I was doing right or wrong because I would ask my classmates, and they would tell me one thing and then another. Then, I had to remember what the professor said about what to do. It was confusing to say the least. We were going to do the div tabs, but Professor Pabico told us that we could just skip that step to make it easier on us. I also think that if we had more time to learn how to make our own website on Dreamweaver in class, it would have been more beneficial. I believe that we only had six class periods to complete our websites. For time sake though, I'm glad that we didn't have to go through the process of learning how to do the div tabs. It would have been frustrating to work on. Also in the beginning of working on the website, we did a coding exercise to get used to formatting in html format. I felt that since we skipped most of the steps that dealt with the coding, we didn't have a chance to really experience coding. I wish that we would have had more time to work on the website because it would have given us experience on how to work with coding and website design in the future. Overall, I think that the website was hard in terms of learning all the steps in making a website. At first, I thought that it was going to be easy, but it's harder than I thought. I would still want to learn more about web design in the future though.