Website reflection

Phew! Finally finished with this website. This was a really frustrating project for me on a couple of levels. While I appreciated the ease in which pages and links were created in Weebly, I also found adding and manipulating objects and elements incredibly cumbersome. I chewed up huge chunks of time trying to accomplish simple tasks. When I finished, I felt the content of my site felt far short of what I would consider an appealing and inviting site. In the end, to be honest, I just wanted it be be complete. I used to do some website design back in the day, most with Dreamweaver and while it was much more complicated than Weebly, I felt I had more control of the look of it and for a former graphic designer, that was important to me. Things like putting borders and boxes around elements, in fact just the positioning of elements was very hard. And for the life of me, I could not figure out why if I highlighted and changed the text on one element, the change invariably occurred somewhere else.

I would like to keep building a site for future use, however, despite the hardships of this project. Perhaps when I was feeling a little more creative and a little less stressed I could accomplish what's probably right in front of my face. The one thing I will strive for in revising this site will be to put more of my personality into. I thought this site did not reflect much of me in that way. I would like to add quotes, links to music, updates on the Red Sox and UConn basketball (and my daughter's high school team), more links to other cool sites and things that make me laugh out loud. I think that it is absolutely crucial for my students to get to know me and having some of personality come through in my class website would help to accomplish this. I also would like to have a student centered page that included webquests and a gallery of student work. So, very much a work in progress...

My check through Truwex revealed numerous warnings and I did manage to make some sense of what the info told me. For instance there were times when I had images and did not include style sheets or text alongside and I understand this could be an obstacle for some visitors. It was actually an interesting task to see the many things I typically did not consider.