I’d like to invite you to view my website, “The Filters of a College Student” at https://agrondine.wordpress.com/. For my website, I wanted to carryover my theme from project 1 to create consistency between the two projects. Thus, my theme for my website is Sorbet, which is colorful and allows three menus (which I found to be pretty restrictive considering the amount of content I wanted to include on my site).

I wanted my site to reach exemplary completion so I worked diligently to make sure it met my standards and I did the best I could with design and layout. I really enjoyed creating a multi-leveled website through the drop down menu bars and creating links in posts and pages that take my readers both within and outside of my website.

I used several modes of communication. While my site doesn’t have automatic music playing, it does lead to other sites that I’m involved with that do and I have a video on one of my pages as well that will give some aural communication to the page. I have a lot of visual modes that I used as well including pictures, colors, and text. Some other visual aspects are the galleries I created as well as how I laid out my website through the multiple menus and pages. I also used spatial because of how I set up my website and through the widgets I used (Tags and calendar). My blog posts fulfill the linguistic mode as well as any text you see on the website. I didn’t use the gestural mode because I thought it would make my page too busy and I didn’t want it to be too distracting.

Something interesting about my site is that I included multiple social media links and modes of communication in which to reach me including LinkedIn, Twitter, e-mail, Pinterest and Google+. Since I’m a public relations major, I thought it would be pertinent information to include since I work with social media a lot. The multiple contact links also highlight the different filters I embody and allows the audience to choose which medium they want to reach me through.

I really enjoyed creating my website. It was fun to add tags to the posts to highlight what I talk about most and to create some dimension on my site. I also had a blast choosing the colors and deciding what I wanted to include and what I wanted to omit. I’m not entirely sure my Site Information page meets the standards for what it’s supposed to be like but I did the best I could based off the examples you provided. I also included a header picture to add some character on the page and it’s a nice accentuating element to my site. I hope you enjoy looking through my website!

Today in class, I organized my site so that it would be more user friendly. At first, I added “Project 1,” “Project 2,” “Project 3,” and so on to my menu, but then I decided to consolidate my menu options so that I just had an “About” page, which features an introduction to my blog and my online identity, a “Blog” page which is what you’re reading now, and a “Projects” menu that will drop down and allow you to click on the different projects we will be working on this semester to choose which one you would like to look at.

Why I did it:

I thought that by consolidating my posts into more specific categories rather than lots of small ones, I would eliminate clutter on my site and make it more user friendly. I also added categories to my posts so that users looking at my site will be able to quickly learn what each posts correlates to. Finally, I added tag words to go along with my posts, like “online identity,” “writing and digital media” and “Virginia Tech” to make my posts more search engine-friendly. I also added my online identity description to my about page because I felt like it would help site visitors understand who I am online.