For my final reflection, I decided to create a video of my website. I wanted to be able to talk about it while you are able to look at it as well.
I honestly enjoyed this course so much, more than I thought I would. I’ve gained more and learned more in this course than a lot of my other courses. The freedom this course gave me over my website really encourages me to continue on with my website long after the course is finished. By creating a website, I am creating something tangible that I can place into my portfolio to show to prospective jobs. I have something to show for my hard-work in this course, and it can be measured in the refinement of my website.
I decided to create a website dedicated on educating adults about children and the development and growth of children. The assignments really helped me put into perspective how I would actually like for my website and blog to work. I created a website layout that was professional and also fun, to match the overall purpose of my website. The design principles assignment and readings really helped me create the website that I did. Understanding the principles of design will help a lot in the workforce. Knowing what looks good and what works well together is something worth learning and remembering even if you aren’t a designer.
I enjoyed the podcast assignment a lot because it is very relevant to activities bloggers are doing in the blogging world today. The skills, experience, and practice I gained from working on my own podcast is valuable. Some of us students wouldn’t have ever imagined making our own podcast. This assignment has allowed us to test the waters, and for me personally, I’m ready to dive deeper. I can definitely see these audio editing skills being utilized in the workforce. Video recording, audio recording, and writing can all be used in school projects, work projects, and personal projects, so it’s always good to keep practicing and learning.
The Wikipedia assignment was also a super fun, but also educational assignment that I enjoyed doing a lot. Yet again, this assignment let students, as aspiring writers and educators, test the waters in article writing for an organization such as Wikipedia. This experience is something I never thought I’d do, and yet it is something I can see myself casually doing now and again. Researching how an organization such as Wikipedia functions, understanding how their community works, and being able to contribute to such a renown encyclopedia is something a student such as myself would’ve never thought to do. I can see myself contributing to the community now, writing articles for the billions of people who use Wikipedia. Through this experience, I have grown more aware of the professional world and how different publishing platforms have different processes and requirements.
Despite my article not getting approved to be published, this course as opened so many doors and has encouraged me to try new things and learn new skill sets. The digital world has so many things to offer to the aspiring writer, creator, and student. It is just a matter of going out there and learning, and despite failing sometimes, getting up and trying again, receiving feedback, fixing mistakes, and honing the skills we learn. I will continue to practice what I’ve learned in this course, and will continue to learn more, so that I can better utilize the skills this course has introduced to me to aid the personal, professional, and civic realms of my life.
Revision is so important because it helps you refine and polish your work. There is never nothing to improve on. Everything has something to improve on. I believe that someone who doesn’t take the time to revise their work is either lazy, ignorant, or afraid. Revising your work can be daunting and it can be hard. I understand that. I’d like to believe that what I create is perfect but there is no growth from believing in such lies. When I submit my work in for class assignments, to be honest, my favorite part is getting feedback from my instructor. The validation that I did a good job and that it was “exceeded expectations” is what I thrive for, but it isn’t always like that, there is always room for improvement. So, despite my desire to be praised, I crave more for constructive criticism because I know that, that is how I am going to grow.
So, I submitted my website in for review and received feedback, from my peers. They really liked my website and thought I did a great job, and they also suggested a few changes and things for me to keep in mind. The first was the suggestion to move my “About Us” tab to the end. The reasoning for this suggestion was because that is were it usually is. In all honestly, I hadn’t really minded the order of my menu tabs, but this suggestion put into perspective for me the way people thing and possibly the accessibility of my website. It made me question how I could start noticing these small things, so I can fix them. Sure, I won’t be able to fix every minimal thing, but I can always keep trying, and keep revising. I don’t want someone to come to my website being distracted by something they aren’t supposed to be distracted by, like the order of my menu. They should be drawn to what I decided should capture their attention. So, that is why I’ve found revision, and the continuous work of revising important to any piece of work, because the more you refine and polish, the better it becomes and the more you learn how not to make the same mistakes.
The next thing I changed was the title of my website. A peer pointed out to me the inconsistency of my title. My title was originally written in all caps, “FROM ME TO YOU,” she suggested I switch it so that only the first letter in each word is capitalized like this, “From Me To You.” I agreed with them and switched it, so only the first letter in each word was capitalized. The reason why I changed it was because it made more sense for it to be this way because it tied into and emphasized the eventual acronym to be used later in on the paragraphs. I find that having it be all caps can be a bit distracting too. This was also a minor change but it was about refining and making this small change which I had initially overlooked but by changing, made all the difference.
The next thing I did was revise my posts. I read through all my posts and checked for grammar and spelling errors, as well as checked that the overall content made sense and wasn’t confusing or sporadic. I think it is good to read over your posts to revise because even in popular blogs and websites, I can often find a few grammar or spelling errors here and there. Yes, these are minimal things, but I believe it makes all the difference between an amateur blog and professional blog. My professor suggested that I include another paragraph for my post on “Understanding the Internet” that expressed my thoughts on the future of the internet 20 or 50 years from now, so I included that paragraph after revising the post. Another reason why it’s good revise is because maybe your views have changed on subject. Instead of writing an entirely new post, you can stem off of an existing post and ride off of that, comparing and contrasting, expressing how and why you views on something has changed from what you’ve previously wrote. I think that is a creative and good way to revive an old post and bring new life to an old subject.
By revising you work, you are showing to your viewers that you care about what you write and what you present them. Each post I write is a part of me. They represent my thoughts, views, and beliefs as I present them to the world. By going through my website refining and polishing my posts and website in general, I am being conscious of what I post up to the world and I made aware time and time again, I am presenting myself to the world. With each small thing I do, I am working to create a better website, a better post, a better podcast, that my audience will know I worked hard on. Revision is the difference between what’s good and what’s great; it is a practice that differentiates the teacher from the students, the master from the amateurs, and the masterpiece from artworks. Continue to revise your work, perfecting and refining what you can. It always helps to ask for feedback because different perspectives can produce different outcomes that you might’ve never thought of. Revise and refine until you can’t no more, and when you get to that point, take a break maybe a week or two, or maybe a month, or even a year, then go back and revise some more. There is always more to be done.
Throughout middle school and high school, I remember using Wikipedia for everything, until I heard that it wasn’t reputable or good, and that I shouldn’t use it to write papers. So, throughout the rest of high school, I avoided Wikipedia like the plague when I wrote papers. Of course, I still used it here in there when I was researching unimportant things that I just wanted general knowledge on, but I never used it again for school papers, that is until college. In college, one of my English professors told us to use Wikipedia to write our papers. I was confused and conflicted at this remark. What he meant was that we should use Wikipedia to get an idea of our writing topics, so we understand the gist of our topic, and click through the references of that the Wikipedia article provides because most often than not, those references are actually reputable and credible sources. He reassured us that he doesn’t want our papers to be based on a Wikipedia article but that he believes that Wikipedia is a good place to start, when digging for more information.
I never thought about writing a Wikipedia article myself, so this assignment definitely took me by surprise. I seemed like a fun and challenging assignment. I would definitely say that find a topic to write about was definitely the hardest part about creating a Wikipedia entry. Literally everything is almost already taken and covered. You’d have to get very creative in your word choice or that you decide to write about, and that is exactly what I did. I knew the Hmong community didn’t have much coverage as it is, so I decided to create an article on one of my most favorite Hmong movies as a child. I grew up watching this Hmong movie as a child, and my friends in the Hmong community did to. As I knew it, this film was ground breaking for the Hmong community, the first ripple in the water for other Hmong films to follow. Kuv Leej Niam was a film created by a Hmong-immigrant who lives in Minnesota, Moua Lee. The film is about a Hmong woman as she struggles through life, battling cultural, social, and economic hardships. It tells of the struggle of a young girl grows into woman and eventually a mother. I knew I had to write about this film because it correlated so well with my website about child and adults.
The first thing I did was try to find any information I could on the film. I wasn’t surprised when I couldn’t find anything. The only thing I found was a IMDB site with minimal basic information. The only other source I found was a library catalog called “WorldCat” which had copies of the film available to the public. Other than this the only other thing I used was the film itself that I found on YouTube. These weren’t very good sources and I understood that but with little to no coverage on the Hmong community and the Hmong film industry in general, I didn’t have expectations.
The second hardest part about a film like the one I chose was the fact that it was entirely in a different language. Since it’s been a while, I decided to re-watch the whole film over again so I could have a grasp about what happened again. Then I went back again and watched it in sections, so I can write it out and summarize it. I had to stop midway to condense my writing because I had written nearly five pages on only the first thirty minutes of the film. Translating was hard and I had to make the choice to cut down on less important dialogue to be able to write more on the more important pieces of the film and required more describing to accurately translate the dialogue. It was definitely hard but ultimately fun to watch it in detail and discover things I missed when previously watching the movie.
The most important thing I’ll take away from this Wikipedia article assignment would be that Wikipedia work hard on what they write. There is a lot that goes into writing a Wikipedia article. A lot of time and energy and research done to cover topics, big and small. I can say that we should give more credit to Wikipedia for doing what they do. Of course I do keep in mind that anyone can write an article on Wikipedia, but I am also reassured that the information I find on wiki has been reviewed, revised, edited, reviewed, revised, and edited again. The team at Wikipedia has a system and are working to make the best of what they have to bring the people what they need and ask for, and I applaud that.
I have submitted my article to be reviewed and published if saw fit, by the Wikipedia time. I feel like the people who would read my article entry would possibly be people who visit my website and hear about my Wikipedia article entry and other people in the Hmong community. Those people in the Hmong community who read the entry would also be the ones to edit my article. I know that I must have gotten at least one thing less than accurate, if not more—translating Hmong is hard.
At the moment I am still working on getting the Wikipedia article published so that it can be made available to the public, but if you have a Wikipedia account you can possibly view the draft here, Kuv Leej Niam.
Everyday people access the web in search of anything and everything from the definition of “pretentious” to how to make a rocket. I use the internet on a daily basis, maybe even an hourly basis. I use it for searching up recipes, words, and for social media. I also use the internet for school and assignments. I honestly think I can say that my life is dependent on the Internet. The internet enables me to connect and interact with people, it gets me to where I need to go, it informs me about events going on around the world, and it tells me what products, places, or services are good or bad. It basically gives me all the information I don’t already know. I’ve never once asked myself how this all works and how I am receiving the information I am. There were multiple instances where I had no connection to the internet and was unable to do or search for what I wanted and times where I was searching for something on a search engine and I couldn’t find what I wanted. Of course, it was unfortunate and frustrating, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I moved on. Those were the only times I questioned the internet, but because I frequently use the internet and will continue to use it throughout my life, I think knowing how the web and internet works will be good.
The web contains mountains of information that becomes available to people in a matter of seconds, so how does this all work? A Universal Resource Locator (URL) is made up of a domain and subdomains. When we enter a URL into a browser, a request is sent to a name server, also known as Doman Name System (DNS). The name server’s job is to retrieves the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the domain. The IP address serves as a connection between the domain and the server. The server then sends back a response through Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) which can contain data, images, or files. HTML gives data to the browser telling it only the structure, headings, paragraphs, and images but it doesn’t stylize it because that is the programming job of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). HTML gives the browser back data of what is in the website, while CSS gives the website personality with the style and look of the website. JavaScript is another programming language that the browser receives data on from the server for a website because JavaScript is used for all dynamic content on a website like tabs and overlays. This is what happens when we know what we are searching for and can type the URL into the browser, but how can we optimize our search for something if we don’t know what we are looking for?
There is a massive amount of information available as data is constantly being requested and received across servers as people search the web. With all this information and data available, to optimize a web search through a search engine, good searchers use brief descriptions for queries. They use precise words or minimize results by being concise. I am guilty of typing whole sentences in the search bars. Sometimes I would find what I wanted, but most of the time I had to rephrase or cut back some words, using only the key words. I guess I kind of learned from trial and error how to be a good searcher. Now, I usually only do key words or phrases. One interesting thing that good searchers do to optimize their web search is they use search operators like “site:” or “filetype:” to narrow down their searches to a certain website or file type. I never knew this was possible, but now that I know, I’ll make sure to use it more often. The internet is so vast and big that it’s important to understand how it works and how to use all the short cuts and tools you can to make your web searching as easy and seamless as possible.
The internet is our future. I believe that in 20 or 50 years from now, we will be immersed in technology that we cannot even begin to think or wrap our minds around right now. There will be new discoveries that we’d have thought were impossible. Things we will have to phantom will be so much that our way of life will have to evolve and adapt to how vast and quickly technology will be taking us. Because of this, the internet will be our best friend. Currently the internet is how main source of information. How we know what is currently happening in our community, town, state, country, and in the world, is relative to the news we receive from the internet. It is scary and daunting to put into words humanities dependency and need for the internet now, but it is the absolute truth. Children these days can’t even imagine what our times were like when we didn’t have internet, and what we had to do to keep ourselves entertained was play outside. Despite this scary fact, I believe that our dependency and curiosity and desire to improve and push the tech industry the way the internet works 20 or 50 years from now will enable us to achieve great things that we cannot even begin to imagine. Despite an unknown future, knowledge hasn’t hurt us so far, what we do with the knowledge we’ve gained is what matters.
My experience with technology has a lot to do with my love for storytelling. My first encounter with technology was actually my first encounter with storytelling. I don’t remember exactly when I first encountered technology or when I first initially used it either. For all I can remember, I was sitting in front of the television ever since I could open my eyes. The big black boxy TV was where I spent nearly half of my childhood. I remember watching Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and nearly all of the Barbie movies as well as countless PBS Kids shows like Zoboomafoo, The Big Comfy Couch, Zoom, and Between the Lions. This was my first exposure to the art of storytelling. Movies and television played a big role in my upbringing because I never had anyone to play with. All my siblings were older than me. My oldest brother is sixteen years older than me, the second oldest is eleven years older, and my sister is five years older than me. My sister would play occasionally, but most of the time my siblings were just babysitting me. I never really had any play time with them and spent most of my time being entertained by the TV. With such an eventful childhood, you can imagine how much I grew to love movies and TV shows. My imagination and creativity came from whatever I saw on TV. Little did I know, that this would be my first exposure to the art of storytelling and the start of my journey with technology.
As I grew up, I grew more and more in love with the art of storytelling, and with the love of storytelling came more encounters with technology. I loved movies, I loved plays, I loved reading and writing, and I loved acting. Once I was able to read, my love for storytelling evolved to another level. Once I finished one book, I’d go back for another. I was in and out of the school library nearly twice a day. I was reading books in class, during class, before class, and after class. Reading was my new favorite thing to do. Reading was my life. Reading books was my second exposure to the art of storytelling.
The first time I used a computer was in elementary school. I loved the computer lab because all we’d do was play games and do typing practices. Because of my love for reading, I developed a love for writing. I enjoyed writing in my notebook, but there was something special about writing on a computer, it seemed more official, and closer to the books. With the internet and computers, I found my way to a new form of storytelling, manga and anime. I would read manga on my home computer and watch anime with my brother and sisters. There was just something different about Japanese storytelling. It was enthralling. With the portability and internet accessibility of the laptop, I found that I didn’t watch movies or television shows as much anymore. The laptop or computer was where I spent a lot of my time.
Eventually I got my own Nook at the age of twelve. It is a reading tablet that also has internet access. My Nook was way more portable than the laptop I used. The Nook had the Google play store and had a bunch of apps I could download and use. It also allowed me to borrow books from my local library, through an app called “Overdrive”. You can bet I was on my Nook twenty-four hours a day. I took it everywhere with me. I didn’t have to lug around thick books with me anymore. All I needed was my Nook, which often had nearly ten books pre-downloaded and ready for me to read at any time. Whenever I got bored, or my eyes were tired from reading too much, I’d just switch over to playing games to take a break. I could also type on my Nook whenever I wished. It was especially useful for when I suddenly got a story idea and needed to type it down before I forgot. The Nook was a definitely a game changer for me, but then I got a phone.
I cried when I got my first smartphone when I was fourteen years old. I was in love and so excited. I spent the whole day figuring it out, downloading apps, setting my background, choosing my theme, and asking for phone numbers. My Nook was portable but bulky. My smartphone was just right. It fit in my pocket and was smaller, but so much more accessible, and it had internet access whenever wanted it. I loved my phone and was definitely addicted. I enjoyed the apps I had on there and loved using it. I remember when I first downloaded Facebook onto my phone and didn’t have to look on the laptop or website anymore. It took some getting used to, but it was definitely exciting. I would scroll forever and ever.
I feel like I grew up with social media, or at least the major ones. First it was Myspace, then Facebook, then Instagram, then Twitter, then Vines, then Snap Chat, and now TikToks. I feel like as we advance with technology, our methods of storytelling evolve as well. It first began with oral stories, then written stories, then pictures, then videos, and now there’s live stream, and even interactive stories. By interactive stories, I mean video games. I feel like as technology grows, so does our method of storytelling. I’ve learned that my love for storytelling was heavily impacted by my experiences with technology, so in the future as I create my own stories to tell, I now know that my stories will have to evolve with whatever new technology the future brings.
Hello everyone! My first podcast episode came out last week, “Episode 00: Welcome to Child of Ours.” It was an introductory podcast to introduce you to the mission and objective of my now found podcast. It will be talking about subject and topics pertaining to children in hopes to educate and inform adults on how to be better role models for their children, by teaching and helping children become the best they can be. Creating the first episode of my podcast, Child of Ours was so fun! It was a new experience and very challenged me in many ways. I enjoyed the creative process and how much I learned from trial and error. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, make sure you do that first. It will help you understand this post as I walk you through the episode’s creation process. I hope this post on the creation process of “Episode 00: Welcome to Child of Ours” is helpful to you and will aid you in creating your own podcast episode.
So, diving right in, the first thing I did was brainstorm on what my podcast will be about. It was rather simple for me because I already had a blog that I wanted my podcast to relate to. My blog was already about children, so it was easy for me to decide to make my podcast also about children. The reason for this is because I want my blog and podcast to work hand in hand. I know that some of my readers have different ways in which they learn, and they might want different mediums they might learn better from, so to satisfy my audience’s needs, having both a blog and podcast as my creative output is beneficial to all of us.
The second thing I did was lay out how my podcast would be organized and run. I wanted to start out organize so that I would’ve struggle or have difficulties later down the line. I think that having a general outline of what I want my podcast to look like is helpful, because then you can structure it in a manageable and efficient way that will make readers come back and help readers begin a routine. I decided to organize my podcasts into series. These series would address a particular subject or topic. Within the series would be episodes. The episodes would narrow down the topic into bite size pieces or questions to be answered, so that my audience will be able to digest the information shared and comment and ask more questions that I can organizationally address, either in my blog posts or in another podcast episode. I think organization is key to keeping an audience, because accessibility to the information they need is what will keep the interested and coming back for more. If they can’t find what they need they won’t stick around. Also, if I can’t find my own way around my podcast and subjects/topics that I am addressing, I can’t keep active and present within my own community of readers/listeners. So, organization is important.
The third thing I did was create my introductory episode. This episode welcomes your listeners and informs them about what your podcast will be all about. This introductory episode was my very first episode and will be the episode production process I walk you through. To create an episode, it’s good to have a goal which we already do for this episode, to introduce the podcast.
The first thing I did for this episode was script it. I used Microsoft Word to type out the script for my episode. I wrote down all the information I wanted to include in the episode and all the information I thought was important for my listeners to know about the podcast, especially the podcast’s mission and objective. After I figured out what was important, I began writing it out, creating a rough draft. Once I got the rough draft done, I read it out loud a few times to make sure the flow was good and there weren’t any weird pauses or run on sentences. I broke my script into sections and labeled each section with a time. I wanted to make sure I stayed within my time slot for my script, which was within 4-5 minutes without any music or special effects, just the voice.
After reading and recording myself quite a few times, I listened and adjusted as needed. I found out that I had more time to spare, so I added more information about the podcast into the script to fill up the time. I didn’t add any miscellaneous information, but important information that would be useful for the introductory episode, something about the podcast that will inform but also engage my audience to keep listening. Aside from adding more to the script, I also worked on my breathing and spacing in reading the script. The pauses and space in between words matter. The sound, level, and tone of your voice impact the length of the podcast and will influence whether or not your audience will want to continue listening.
Once the time was all good and I’ve perfected my voice and reading to the best of my abilities, I did my final recording of the script. It is okay if you mess up. I just paused for a few seconds and continued on wherever I wished. Through trial and error, I have found that having one long recording of the script with pauses in-between is better than having a handful of short recordings. When you have one long recording, there seems to be less feedback, changes in volume or tone, and it is easier to import it into the editing software application.
My recording was a mp4 recording on my phone, so I just shared it to my Google drive. On my laptop, I accessed my Google drive and downloaded my shared mp4 recording into my Digital Writing folder in my laptop, so I could retrieve it later to work on it in Adobe Audition. I opened Adobe Audition and imported my mp4 recording into the application. I edited my recording by cutting out the pauses and spacing my recording in matter that sounded natural and had a nice flow. I adjusted the volumes to make sure that it wasn’t to loud or quiet. I silenced any background noises present in the recording by zooming in on the audio recording and muting whatever small section was making the noise. I made sure to not over process it because it would ruin the sound quality and take away the rawness and natural tones of my voice.
Once I was done editing the mp4 recording, I placed it into the mixer. To add some pizzazz into my podcast and make it livelier, I searched for royalty-free music online. I found a site called Zapsplat, which had free sound effects and music. I searched for lively children’s music and was able to find a good tune that fit with the vibe I was aiming for in my podcast. I downloaded the music, saving it to my Digital Wiring folder again. I imported it into the session I was working on with the mp4 in Adobe Audition. After importing it, I worked on it and cropped and edited out the portions of the song I didn’t want and the portions I did want. After I was done editing, I placed the music snippets at the beginning and end of my edited mp4 recording.
To make sure that the transitions were smooth between the music and the recording, I made sure to work on the fading. I worked with the fading to make sure there weren’t any harsh endings or abrupt beginnings. I wanted it to be seamless and I wanted the music to blend in, right into the dialogue.
After I fixed all the transitions, and listened to the entire podcast from start to finish a couple times to make sure everything flowed well and there weren’t any harsh beginnings or endings or too large of a gap between words or phrases, I exported the mix into a mp4 recording. Once it was done mixing into an mp4 recording, I named it “Episode 00: Welcome to Child of Ours” and I saved it into my Digital Writing folder, to later submit it to my teacher and post it online to my blog.
The steps I took to create “Episode 00” Welcome to Child of Ours” were roughly experimental as I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but a little help from Google was all I need to make this podcast. Creating a podcast and producing your own episode is fairly easy and doesn’t take too much energy. It is a creative and fun process that I’d suggest everyone try sometime. I hope this has helped inform you in some way and I hope you, as my readers, try creating a podcast episode of your own someday. If you have any questions always feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be glad to help!
In the development and creation of a website, it is of utmost importance that you understand the principles of design. The principles of design not only enable you to create and aesthetically pleasing website, but it also helps you create an engaging and user-friendly website. The success of a website and retention of viewers is dependent on how well and effectively you communicate through the screen. As aspiring writers, readers, and users of the internet, understanding how successful websites work will help us refine our how we view websites and how we relate to the content displayed before us. All of the design principles are important and relevant, but for my blog, I’ve chosen five principles I want to focus most on to further personalize my website’s aesthetic: unity, emphasis, hierarchy, repetition, and variety.
I chose unity as one of the most important design principles that I will incorporate into my website because I feel like it will be a challenge for me. I feel like as a person, I am very sporadic. I have many different ideas running through my head at all times, and I am constantly multitasking. I am indecisive and like to have many options. For a website, this isn’t good. If my website portrayed my brain, it would be like “Where’s Waldo?” Your brain would heart trying to find the main purpose of my website as you shuffle through countless other irrelevant content. Unity in design is the opposite of my brain because unity in design is aims to relate and bring visual elements together. By instilling and making it a priority to make sure my website exudes unity, I am challenging myself to consciously be mindful of the content I post up and the aesthetics I align my website with. I think a unified website is great because readers will not be confused and will know what to expect from your website. Also, by having a unified website, emphasizing something will be a lot easier to achieve.
Emphasis was the second design principle I chose because, I think the ability to emphasize something important in your website is crucial when communicating to your audience. Emphasis in design is the parts of a design that brings out the most important part of your website. By selectively using emphasis on important parts of my website, I can draw the audience’s attention to the most important matters. I think emphasis would be most useful for new information. I would use emphasis on my website to make sure new content would be the thing viewers are drawn to because it would contrast with the rest of the website. I think a change in elements like color or shapes would definitely help me emphasize important parts of my website. I do understand though, that emphasis should be used in moderation though, or else everything will just clash. That is why ordering things from most to least important is something I’ll need to establish when creating designing my website.
Hierarchy in design is when the important elements within a website appears as important as it is. This is achieved through the use of title and headings. Hierarchy helps the flow and movement of the website, enabling viewers to process the content, from most to least important. By using hierarchy, I can offer my viewers my content in digestible increments. With the use of titles, headings, and subheadings, readers will be less confused by the content I post. To help with the effectiveness of hierarchy, I want to incorporate the “three click rule.” By using this rule, viewers will be able to quickly access the information they need. By using headings for general categories and subheadings for more specific posts, I can help readers easily access information they need. This is a hierarchy design principle because the title is the overall purpose of the website, the heading would be a more general topic, and the subheadings would be more specific posts within that particular topic. I think this hierarchy design principle will be very useful in organizing the different content I’ll having in my website. With hierarchy, to keep things consistent without taking away the emphasis from the important parts of the website, repetition will be useful to help keep the design of my website unified.
Repetition is used to unify different elements within a design, and it also helps to reemphasize certain ideas in w website. I can use repetition to further unify the design of my website in a variety of ways through color, shapes, and typefaces. For now though, I think the best way I can utilize repetition to bring unity to my website is through repetition in the headings of the topics I will be addressing. I will be having different series in my website. Within each series will be a topic, and within each topic will be a specific question I will be addressing that relates to the topic. I’m thinking that each series will be a couple months, each month will be dedicated to a topic, and each week I’ll be answering a specific question through my post and podcast. To make sure that everything doesn’t get too out of hand and for my series and monthly topics to work, I’ll need to incorporate repetition in the design and presentation of the content I’ll be addressing. Each series will have their own page, with a designated color (ex. blue), and within the page would be the topics that’ll be addressed, all in different hues of the designate color (ex. turquoise blue, royal blue, baby blue, indigo blue). Each topic will have about three or four posts answering a question, all in the same hue. The typeface will be the same throughout everything, with the only changes being in the themed colors. I think this will be the most challenging but also the most rewarding design aspect of my website. The usage of color and different hues of color is my attempt to bring variety out from the unity I’ll be trying hard to achieve.
Variety in design is used for the views, to draw them in and keep them interested. If a design is too muted without much change or options, it becomes boring and uninteresting. By using different colors, I hope to bring life and variety into my website, while still maintain the connection across all my content. Variety can bring about chaos in design as well if not used carefully, and I understand this, that is why unity is my most important design element and variety my last. With the use of variety, I have found that my use in variety with the colors won’t bring disorder to my website and content but will help to further unify different ideas within my website. My use of variety in design is helping the other elements of design in my website and creating a more interesting and aesthetically pleasing experience for my viewers.
Design principles are important when creating your own website. To create a successful website that not only draws viewers in, but keeps them coming back, we must be knowledgeable in these design principles and actively incorporate these principles into our design so that we can provide our viewers with the best experience. I chose to focus mainly only five design principles, but it doesn’t mean that the other principles are less important and won’t be use, but it’s quite the contrary. The other principles are just as related to each other as the principles I chose, even if I wanted to exclude them, by using even just one design principles, you are utilizing at least two other principles along with it in some way or another. The aesthetics of a website plays just as big of a role as the content on the website, so just like how it takes time to perfect our content, we should take the time to refine the design of our website.
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