When I first started my website, I decided that simple was the best option for me, since I have never attempted website creation. It was kind of intimidating at first, but our crash course on html allowed me to see that this was, in fact, something that I could do. My site initially consisted of a homepage, a link to the EMU website, and links to my portfolio, my final essay, and "stuff about me."
As we read through various web style guides and discussed them in class, I began draw some conclusions as to what makes a site a good one or a bad one, regardless of how complex or simple the site may be. The following websites proved to be the most beneficial to me:
To me, the most useful initially was "From Sucky to Savy." This site is simple and easy to understand, without too much techno mumbo-jumbo for a novice such as myself. Within this site, I was mainly focused on the idea of creating a site that is easy to navigate and attractive. I took notice of the tip indicating to use plain backgrounds. This seems like common sense, but I immediately changed by site. I had patterned backgrounds which were definitely too much too look at and read text from. I figured that, in the very least, would make my site less "sucky."
The "Web Style Guide" also provided some good insights into creating my site. Since I knew noting about graphics and I was about to attempt to download some onto my site, the Style Guide's tip to try to keep all graphics in jpg format so that everyone could view the grahpics made sense to me. I also noted that "browser safe colors" should be used within the pages so that the colors are uniform regardless of where or how one is viewing the page. That led me in picking basic colors for my backgrounds.
The last guide I referred to when making my site was "Spider Pro." As a result of this site I kept in mind to use descriptive titles for my links to keep reader confusion to a minimum when navigating my site and to avoid "this page under construction" on pages that I was working on. I also noted the tip of creating a consistent look within your site from the "design" portion of Spider Pro's guide. With that in mind, I kept all of my text simple and created in the same font and tried to use colors that blended together.
As a result of all of the style guides we read and discussed, I also made some other basic changes to my site as I went alson. First, influenced by readings, I created a link on the top and bottom of each page for ease of navigation. At first, I was going to have separate links from my homepage to each of my written assignments. Again, for ease of navigation, I changed that idea and created one portfolio page that links to each of my assignments and back to my home page again.
Although my personal website it about as basic as it can get, I am rather proud of my first attempt at website creation.