Beginnings and Ends

How-to Site

I started with an idea, something that I was midly interested in. I knew the tone I wanted to take and the audience I wanted to reach. I wanted it to be playful and funny yet I wanted the material to relect what people really believe about Aquarians (if you subscribe to the idea of astrology).

I have no visual hiercacy with the expcetion of the sidebar, which is clealy set apart from the rest of the links, however, the reader still doesn't know what to do first.

It starts with a quote, and if the reader goes in order, they will read that first but it should be set apart from the rest of the text and set as less important. The way it looks now, it takes away from the main text.

On the side bar, the quote at the top and bottom is bolded, which also makes it more important than the rest of the material on the page.

This project taught me: Its one thing to have a few good ideas inside of my head, (the quotes, the humor, the tone) and yet another thing to try to fit it all on one page without an regaurd for my reader.

Repurposing

I came into this project feeling excited because this was something personal to me, my sister is a big part of my life, I was exicted to incorportate what I learned into this project and take it from a boring 8 page (1600 word) essay to something that illistrates what I really experienced. I knew that I had the opperunity to interject my own voice which is something I didnt have the luxery to do in print.

I started with alot of text, and struggled with deciding what was most important. Looking back, I wish I would have used almost all of the text and just organzied it better with bulleted lists and headers.

I like the black the white look of it, I'm beginning to feel that I am more comfortable doing simple pages and its a nice break from the way I felt when I finished the how to site.

The main design error that I made was centering the text.

In the end, I learned that it isn't necessary to cut text to make it web ready, but instead to just create a hieracry for the reader so they understand what is important.

Hypertext

After my repurposing page, I knew I wanted something really simple, and I was going to do the black and white thing again, but wanted to try something different. So I took a poem that I thought related well to my life and set that as the homepage.

I felt a little uncomfortable with JUST my voice through out the whole site because every other time I had relyed on an expert source for information. I wasn't sure what the reader would feel, or if they would relate. I concluded that each person has a view of success, because its a part of life that you can't avoid: success and failure (I talk about both). Also, people always apperciate a story. Chances are, if they found my site in search for the "what is sucess" poem, they apperciate a piece of writing.

I spent more time writing on the project then designing. Each page is the same, the naviagation is simple, follows the order of the poem.