Some of my work that I have done for Writing through Media this semester has been compiled and put on this webpage. I chose to keep the design of the website relatively simple because I wanted the projects and blogs to be found easily. I also chose to have a sidebar on every page of the site to remind people what they are looking at. In addition, I decided to use green colors because, apart from the fact that I like the color green, I always think of green as the color of biology. Green is the color of plants, the basis for the acquisition of energy in ecosystems.
In terms of designing the CSS for the website, I found it to be very difficult to do the coding from a pre-made layout, as opposed to from scratch, where you know everything you are doing so it is easy to make adjustments and figure out where you went wrong. With the layout, many aspects of the page were already coded for, but done so in a way that made it very difficult to change it. This frustrated me a great deal, especially when I spend hours attempting to figure out how to change the color of one small thing, still to no avail.
The projects that I chose to use revolved mostly around Australia, which just happened to be a coincidence. Those projects just happened to be the ones that I felt most proud of. I even included an extra blog that I created to tell about my experience in Australia through pictures, which I liked because it was straightforward and simply told about the picture and my experience with that particular subject matter. The other projects were both photoshopped pictures that I did. Because I had spent a lot of time working on these pictures and thought that they turned out well, I felt that they would be a good inclusion for my portfolio.
While this portfolio is supposed to be the start of my digital identity, I still feel strange about being able to be found on the internet. Some people view this as a great opportunity to have their works on display for potential employers among other people, but I still feel that my projects are not impressive enough to help me in this way. I also feel that my career path will take me in a direction where blogs and photoshopped pictures will not be beneficial to a potential employer. It is possible that in the future I could have a sort of resume of the various activities, jobs, and schooling I’ve done over the years displayed on a website. But for now, I am still insecure about my digital identity and it is, still, a work in progress.
I wanted the colors to be more personal to me, so I decided to make the background colors a dark and light green. I had to change the CSS code for multiple sections for the background to become dark green and changed the navigation bar, the page entries, and the sidebar to light green. I also added more tabs, one for each project and an About tab. The site originally opened to the "blog" tab so I got rid of this entirely and had it open to the "About" page instead. I then changed the order of the tabs. I added a text widget to the sidebar so that someone browsing would always be able to see that it is my website they are on, regardless of whether or not they are on the "About" page. I also linked my other blog to the website so that it would be accessible and open in a new tab. In addition, I had to change the code so that not all of the links had the same background color. I had to make it so that links in .entrybody areas had a light green background and those elsewhere had the dark green background. I made the words of the tab turn white when the mouse hovers over them. I also changed the "powered by..." font size to 50% so that it would not overpower the page. I also, finally, moved the position of the sidebar so that it was not hugging the "entrybodies" and the navigation bar too much. I did this by using position: relative and then moving it right and down, each 50px. It also took a very long time, but I was able to make the tab of the page the viewer is on dark green and I had wanted to make the rest of them light green, but I could not find the CSS that coded for this so that I could change it. Believe me, I tried.