Blogs and Websites

My Learning

This week we worked on blog design and website platforms. I found this week really helpful as far as the blog aspect, and really interesting when it came to the website side. 

Blog

My blog really needed some upgrades and the articles that we read this week really helped me figure what to do as I will discuss later. I was not really sure what a blog should look like because this class is the first time I have done anything with blogs. While I was looking at the blogs that the articles gave as examples, specifically Fubiz the one I mentioned in my discussion, I noticed that they were a lot more complex than the blogs that we have for this class. One of the points about having a good blog was to make it simple so as not to distract from the content. Fubiz, and a lot of the other blogs did this while making it complicated enough to still captivate the eye. It showed me how different blogs can be from each other and how much more there is to learn. 

Websites

I always thought that a website was something that only professionals could have or people with a business. While I did discover that it was possible for anyone to make a website before now, I did not realize how easy it was. I think that it is a really good resource to be able to make a website as simple and easy as google sites makes it. Not everyone is gifted when it comes to technology, and making things like making a website easier, includes more people into the world of technology which is huge today.

My Blog

As I mentioned before, simplicity was mentioned a lot, specifically in the article "5 Keys To Make Your Business Blog Visually Awesome" at the very beginning. As I looked over my blog, I saw that while it was simple, it was almost too simple but not in the right ways. My posts were not broken up very well, with only a couple paragraphs and no headings, so I went through my posts and found where I thought headers and paragraphs should go so it is much easier to read now. 

The colors of my blog did not go well together and the article mentioned before says that colors of your blog set the tone for the reader. I decided to change my background to a soft blue mountain scene, and I changed the theme to a simple translucent white box, rather than the red that was there before. 

I was a little frustrated when it came to the fonts because I could not find how to change some of them. However, I did change the font of my titles and kept the normal text as simple as possible with a white background, for easy reading. 

Website

https://sites.google.com/view/jasmines-photography/home

Taking pictures is something that I really enjoy doing, especially since I spent too much money on a nice camera. This is why I decided to make my website about my photography. Overall I really like Google sites, especially because I am a beginner at website making. Everything was really simple and easy to figure out. At first I had no idea where to start so I decided to explore some photography websites for some inspiration. I wanted most of the focus to be on my photos so I did not put a lot of text in, but I did add some text boxes in order to explain some of the photos. I liked that it was really easy to move things around so that I could change things as I went along.

I had a lot of fun with this weeks activities and I was surprised at how these things that I though only certain people could do, are actually available to everyone and are easy and simple to use as well.