My Website

I was hesitant at first because I was unfamiliar with a big portion of the programs that we were going to be utilizing to create our website. Dreamweaver, Indesign, and Photoshop are programs that I have little to no experience with. This project was a very beneficial one. For us to be able to create our own websites will pay off farther down the road in more ways than one. My website will most definitely be used for my self promotion. The first way it will be used is that it will be up online and people who may not mean to come across may come across it. They may be interested in hiring me or contacting me about information regarding my journalism experience. Just by searching my name through Google there is the chance that my website will show up. Another way it will be used for self promotion is giving my prospective employers the link for my website instead of giving them each clip, video, resume, etc. that I have. For example, in an interview if the person interviewing me asks for that information I can just give them my url and they can check out everything themselves. They would be able to see my biography, pictures of myself, my resume, and my portfolio. They'll also be able to see all of my different contact information. Lastly with self promoting myself with my website I will keep all of my information and pictures very professional. I will only use my website for job and internship purposes. Keeping it up to date with all of my current information and portfolios is also very vital. The social media projects that we have worked on thus far this semester have tied in with this current project. They have gotten us more familiar with the internet and more knowledgeable with the social media sites that we will be broadcasted on our website. I will have my Twitter, Tumblr, Blogger, and LinkedIn accounts accessible on my site. The plan is to have an icon for each of those sites that will link to my page on that site. That will allow people who are looking at my page to go to my site directly from from my website. Working on the previous social media project also helped us with coding. In the Wikipedia pages we used some coding to put bullets in our lists and to adjust the size and font of our words. The previous social media projects also helped with giving us experience in presenting ourselves in a mature manner. For example, when we created company pages in our Facebook project we had to represent them in a professional way. We used professional looking pictures that respectfully represented that company in a good light. That will help us in the future when we're tempted to put pictures that may be questionable to future employees on our social media sites. Designing the website was very involved and took a lot of thought and time. Planning out what I wanted to include in my website was the fun part. I got to plan the layout, colors, themes, backgrounds, and pictures. I chose to include a different picture of myself on each page, besides the resume page, and to keep the same background on each page. In terms of the software we were using for this project, it was tough for me. I have never used Dreamweaver or Indesign and have not really gotten too much experience with photoshop. Dreamweaver was really frustrating and confusing in terms of the coding. Coding just never seems to work well with me it always looks so confusing. I did learn a lot about it though and I'm way more knowledgeable about it than I was when I first entered this class. Indesign wasn't too bad but I will have to play around with it a bit more for me to be fully comfortable using it, and the same goes for Photoshop. I'm pretty good with organizing stuff so the organization aspect of this project I was pretty good with. I kept everything under names that were easily recognizable as to what they were and kept everything in the right places and folders. Being organized with everything else in my life definitely payed off when it came to keeping all my files and website material together and organized. I look back now and I appreciate everything that I have learned in this class. At times the stress and frustration was very overwhelming and I was ready to be done with each project. Definitely glad I stuck with everything though. The skills that I have learned in this class will forever follow me to future adventures. Social media has taken over the communication and journalism world, and will continue to do so and having a class that familiarizes people with the different sites is absolutely necessary. Working on this project also helped me deal with the frustration and stress that it was causing. Everyone works and learns at a different pace and it was frustrating sometimes waiting for people to catch up to where you are. I became more considerate and also became a lot more comfortable asking for help and questions. I plan to get the whole Adobe CS5 in the near future so I can become 100% comfortable with each program. That will definitely pay off when I apply for jobs and I can say that I am familiar with all of it. It will put me ahead in the running against someone who may also be applying for that same job. Although I did not successfully get my website to be fully working online, the experience and what will come out of having a website is definitely appealing to me. I hope to take this Dreamweaver class over the summer where I may hopefully be able to publish my own website to the World Wide Web. Thanks for the experience with it all Professor Pabico, I really did appreciate it.