design and credits
In creating this site, the focus was to make a website that represented my personal work as well as my personality. The goal was to complete a web site that potential employers could view, and see my experience in many genres of writing, including web-based writing. I wanted to create an easy-to-use website that was appealing and simple, as well as professional. While this was a very challenging project, I am pleased with the final result.
The first priority in creating this site was to make it professional in appearance. The site is representative of me as a professional writer, and so the design is simple, elegant, and feminine. In the beginning, the pink and red tones seemed like it would be overwhelming, but the end result was interesting, but clean and chic.
The menu design was fairly straightforward. The goal was to create the navigation bar at the top, as well as the menu on the side of the page so that no matter where the user is on the website, they would be able to get from one page to another quickly. Also, the whole site needed to work together, and that's why there are two menus and they all share the same graphic styles and colors. While they are somewhat distinctive from one another, they are still cohesive.
This website is based off a template called Spontaneous. The template had a green theme to begin with, and in the end the color choice didn't reflect my personality, so it was changed to a more feminine color pallette. Also, the simplicity of the design lent itself well to being a portfolio website. The options for links on the side, and the navigation bar at the top, make it easy for writing samples to be displayed consistently on every page. Overall, the theme was intended to look professional as well as feminine to reflect the right personality and tone.
Since the site is designed as a portfolio, the content was the most important factor. In order to make this site effective as a portfolio, I included samples of writing on every page in one of the side menus. Also, a Resume page, Contact page, and the About page were included to showcase my successes as a writer, as well as my job history. The content included in the website was thought out and only the most important information was placed on the site. Even though it's a portfolio website, it was important that all the content on the website exemplified my skills as a writer above all else.
Overall, the design and content of the page works well for the purpose that it's serving. It shows not only the professional aspect of a portfolio website, but the personality aspect that is incredibly important in creating this type of website.
To start, it was a daunting task to code HTML and CSS, but as the task went on it became easier and more understandable. The first aspect of the design that was completed was the color scheme. It was important to get this part of the design completed because it acted as a jumping off point for the rest of the design.
After that, all the links to the pages were created so that a user could easily navigate through the pages on the website. Then, the cotent was added to the website. Finally, details were added, like extra graphics and PDF files of documents. Overall the design process went fairly smoothly and by having the tone of the website established first, the rest came somewhat naturally.
Writing for the web is a different genre from many other forms of writing. As I developed content for the website, I had to take into account the audience that would be viewing the site. Shorter paragraphs and simple sentences were a couple of the concepts I focused on most. Even while writing for this page, it was a distinct choice to use the first person point of view, versus the common third person point of view found in most report writing.
Taking into consideration the amount of space that a page should really take up, I found it was difficult to cut back on the content that was presented. For example, on the Resume page I struggled with fitting all the content in the best format. Most content is supposed to be "above the fold", and that concept was an important part in creating content for the website. Overall, writing on the web is a more difficult genre then the conventions imply because, while the writing might be more relaxed, the design aspect becomes much more important.
Creating a website, even from a template, was quite an undertaking. There were many elements that went into designing a professional and chic portfolio website, while also making sure that all the content was easy to understand. There were many considerations in creating the website, including things like conventions for writing for the web and the audience that the website would be focused on. Opposite from writing in many other genres, there are so many aspects that make a site work well rhetorically, such as: design, layout, and tone. These are important in other professional documents, but the amount of people viewing a website is so much larger that there are obviously more aspects of design that need to be considered.
Designing this website taught me a lot about writing for the web, and also taught me a lot about how important technology is becoming in the writing field. While this is surely not the end of designing forthe web, it was at least an informative and interesting experience.
The credits for the website are listed below.
This website used various sources for its completion. The site design is a free template that was modified by Janelle Wing. The following is a list of resources that were used on this site.
Also, the icons used on my Contact page and Home page were downloaded for free from the following sources.