To start my coursework off, I drew out a makeshift flow chart with different steps on it which allowed me to have an organised method in completing each of the different tasks. The next lecture we had, we were going through the material and it turns out this method has a professional term in the industry called ‘The Waterfall Method’. The basics of the chart showed that what I would do is write both the reviews, the ‘about’ page and the report before I’d even considered creating the website itself. Therefore, the main bulk of all the work can be done within the early stages allowing me to concentrate more on the website design and to possibly improve on my reviews as I learn more content. When going through this it made sense to do the ‘about’ page first and then go on to do both the reviews of the education services. Once I completed that, I started the report but only half way finished it since I had to write about the website design as well.

With the entire assignment, the ‘less complicated’ bits were writing the pages seeing as though it wasn’t new to me and it’s with software that I’m very familiar with. The more challenging side to writing the reviews was phrasing what you wanted to say in a professional manner and being concise at the same time. The other quite difficult process I personally found was referencing information or quotes that I had used during the reviews.

Following on from this idea of the less complicated tasks, we come to the more complicated tasks. I found WordPress to be quite a difficult website to function in the way that the pages would either show up everywhere, or nowhere. Creating the side bar function was also a challenge because I thought that I could just jump right in at the deep end and kind of trial and error my way through working the processes. Turns out this wasn’t the case and once I reset the whole thing, I looked over at some tutorials online and figured out how to at least get the ‘pages’ showing in a menu. As a long list of problems, I feel that the first was that even when you edit the page and press ‘Save and Submit’ the page itself doesn’t update. So, you have to go and visit the site to have a look at what changes you made. I found it easier to either write down on paper what I was doing then go back and see the changes to fully understand what I just did or I kept a constant tab open of the old site and then created a new tab with ‘updated’ site. The final big problem that I encountered was making the static page work. For some reason, it wouldn’t stay as what I wanted so again I had to look at the online resources to figure out how to make it work and very quickly I found a tutorial showing me what to do.

Overall, though I encountered several problems with WordPress, I feel that because it has such an extensive community the process was made a lot easier with the vast amounts of tutorials. Another great thing is that the tutorials can be on YouTube or direct from WordPress.