Tia Thompson
ENG 328
4/17/2006
It had been years since I had created a website. I created
my first website in the fall of 2000, in a 100 level computer
science course. So when I got the assignment to build the
website for this course it was like starting over.
Not too
mention this website had to be in HTML format. The assignment
wasn’t hard, it was just tedious and I was very unfamiliar wit
HTML format. After the first website I quickly learned how to
use other programs and created my website using Microsoft Word,
saving my text as a website. This allowed me to easily format
the look of my web site without the confusion of HTML details. I
looked to other web sites to see how certain features could
grasp the attention of my audience with out causing confusion.
With my audience being my first priority I searched for other
sites that were easy to navigate and read.
Initially my website was very simple. It displayed a very
large portrait of myself (only because I was unaware of how to
resize it), and links to some of my favorite websites. The links
to my favorite sights are still there, but now I have added a
web portfolio with links to all of my completed assignments for
this course. A link to my blog is also here, and soon I will
place a link to my collaborative group assignment. I also added
my resume to my and cover letter to my website. Links in the
portfolio page are specific so that my reader has a good idea of
what the content of each essay will be. Lynch and Horton’s
advise to make paragraph breaks in my essays to make processing
information easier for the viewer.
These sites greatly helped in creating my web site:
Spiderpro’s Styleguide:100 Dos and Don’t in Web Design
Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide
I added pictures and attractive colors to my website mainly
because this is an online class where we are unable to view each
other, and also because to much text can be overwhelming and
frustrating for the audience. The site must be easy to navigate
and extract information from. My background is consistent
throughout the homepage and links in my web site. I used the
pink background as a linking device to help my visitors feel a
sense of unity when navigating through different links, also
because pink is a calming color, I wanted my audience to feel at
ease while navigating. According to Spiderpro’s 100 Dos and
Don’ts, this is vital to not confusing your viewers, “Use the
same look and feel for all the pages at your site. This way your
visitors have a sense of recognition when they visit various
pages.”
Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide lists the many uses of
tables. It says, “You can use invisible tables to control more
precisely how these typographic devices render on the page.” I
used invisible tables to maintain order and structure while
creating my website. Tables are an effective way to keep
information consistent and organized on a web site. Lynch and
Horton also suggest that “the overall organization of the site
will have the greatest impact on the experience” so I organized
and reorganized to make easy for the viewer to find what they
needed.
Overall, this project has been a learning experience. Creating
the first website was a much more difficult task than this one.
Learning to create the website in HTML taught me the
technicalities and mechanics of creating a website. Once I was
familiar with how to create a webpage using Microsoft I was able
to focus more on my audience, and making my sight more navigable
and legible.