Steps
The first step to creating the site was choosing a theme. I wanted a theme that was attractive but not distracting or overbearing in anyway. I eventually settled on the ‘Twenty Ten’ theme for this reason. I chose to keep black and white as the primary colours as I saw them as the least distracting. I wanted my theme to avoid being distracting as much as possible because I didn’t want to subtract from the written text in any way, so as to increase the likelihood of my text being read in it’s entirety. I inserted the image of Newcastle University into my header because the blog would be too unattractive if it was completely blank, and the unattractive-ness would distract from the contents of the site.
The next step was creating the functionality of the site. I created 6 pages, 1 for the home page, 3 for reviews, 1 for the report, and 1 for the about section. The 3 review pages were divided into 1 main page, and 2 sub pages which each held 1 review. I then created a Menu and linked every page I had created on to it. Afterwards I inserted all of my content onto their corresponding pages. Once I was satisfied with the content, I used private browsing mode to check the site functioned properly.
What was Easy?
The easiest part of the assignment was constructing the site. blogs.ncl.ac.uk makes it exceedingly to create a functional site in the image you wish. It has a very clear design and has a wide range of options which can be customised. This meant the creation of the site went very quickly and for the most part without hiccups.
Another part of the assignment which was simple was writing the review on YouTube. YouTube’s size lends itself to review writing as it has a large list of pros and cons. On top of this inserting the written reviews into the site was also very simple. The tools provided are excellent for formatting your piece, and provide easy ways to insert extra content (such as images) into your piece.
What was hard?
The part of the assignment which I found the most challenging was writing the part of the report on the advantages of Wikipedia. This is because Wikipedia serves one function (which it does very well), to provide information on specific topics. However, once you have described this function it becomes difficult to attribute Wikipedia with more advantages without repeating yourself multiple times. To solve this I shifted the focus of my report instead onto the disadvantages Wikipedia has to other online tools. This was useful because, although Wikipedia is extremely useful, it does have many drawbacks which are easy to express.
An additional problem I encountered was deciding which online tools to use for my reviews. There are so many tools available online which all have multiple discussion points. In the end I settle on YouTube and Wikipedia. YouTube, because it is the tool I use the most outside of University. I use it for all of it’s functions, but mostly for entertainment and extra-curricular learning. And Wikipedia because it is the tool I use the most for University related work.
In the end
All in all I feel as if I created a functional easy to use site, and accurately portrayed both YouTube and Wikipedia as very useful tools that still have a lot of downfalls.