Guess I need to work on this whole “blog” thing. I’ll be honest I’m not a big computer person so remembering to do this escapes me most of the time. However, it is nice to see where everyone else is with their projects and makes me feel like my own is at the right stage.
So, along with being horrible at blogging and keeping you guys and gals up to date, I’m also pretty bad at setting up websites. Mostly because I’ve never done it before. However, I feel that Shane and I have quite a bit of useful information. We have a lot of strong sources, primary and secondary, images, figures. Lots of stuff to sort through. That will be another challenging part, sorting through it all. Of course we want people to read the website and not just look through the pretty pictures and timelines. As a history major, I find the real meat and potatoes to be in the written parts of a project and not so much in the extra-curricular aspects. But as Shane mentioned in his blog post, we’re going to struggle to make our website not just a lot of endless paragraphs on endless pages.
So, that’s why it’s nice to see what my classmates are posting about! I believe you folks will really help bring out the creativity in Shane and I. Give us some ideas about what we could do with our own website, ideas on how to structure it, so on and so forth.
I think it’s awesome that you are completely trying something new with this class. I’m also excited to read about your project- whether it is paragraph upon paragraph or not. I think that any website has to be catered toward the topic, and your topic might be interesting to try new designs. At this point, I have no interesting ideas to contribute, as I am not all that creative either. However, I think that some of the other people in this class have great ideas and they are also helping my creative side flourish! Good luck with it all!
I am also bad with websites! I attempted to make a blog in middle school and it failed miserably. Needless to say, I’ve picked up on a few things throughout high school and college. This class has also taught us a lot about using Word Press, so I’m sure our websites will all work out great! To help break up the paragraphs of information, you could add maps and pictures! If you write out a paragraph and notice that there are a lot of specific dates, you can change the format and make it a timeline. You could also create a diagram to show different types of information (Us biology majors LOVE diagrams). These different formats can help break up the meat and potatoes of your project!
Hi Anthony,
I just want to let you now that I 100% agree with your frustration with blogging and website design. I know there is some creativity within you, we all have it. However, sometimes deadlines and restraints can damper our creative muses. Maybe you can brainstorm other ways you are creative and see if you can somehow tie those skills into your website. For example, I recently discovered my love and talent for photography, and I jumped all over the opportunity to exploit that skill for this project. Another thing is that creativity can be quite unpredictable – so I will say that having to make all these plans for a creative project throws me off a bit.
Maybe try to reach out to some friends and ask them their ideas for how you can present your information. Ask them what they would want to see and what they wouldn’t want to see. Start throwing stuff together early even if its ugly so you can get feedback. Once you start seeing something thrown together it will become clearer to you what you want – because if nothing else you will be able to see what you don’t want. Now I can give others pretty good advice but I need to take my own advice haha.
If you guys need any input from me I am happy to help, feel free to reach out! Good luck!
Peace & Love,
Abriana
Even as millennials Kailee and I are also struggling to figure out how to make our topic depicted on our website in a interesting and tech-savvy way without taking away the meaning of our topic. We were thinking of organizing our website to make it interactive. We will embed links in our timeline, and then the person on the site can directly go to the section we are talking about. That way it will not just be continuous pages of writing. Good luck!