Today is the final workshop day for our web portal projects! Over the last two weeks we have certainly covered a lot of ground. After today, I am much closer to finishing my project, but may still need a little time in the grace period to make the site as polished as I would like it.

What I Did

I think the biggest change today, and what I spent most of class working on, was the addition of my “Travel” page. Read below to see why I consider this to be such a positive improvement to my blog!

Why I Did It

I added the travel page for a few reasons. First and foremost, I’ve been struggling with ways to really make this site unique. As a Political Science student, I don’t have a web or design portfolio I could add. I’m not particularly interested in football, and I don’t have a particular fascination with any one band. But what I do love is to travel, and I’ve been some cool places in the last couple of years. Adding these pictures to my site gives a good idea of something I’m really interested in and something unique about me. Not many people have been to Israel!

Since Wednesday, I put the final touches on my blog. I edited my pages for content and mechanical/grammatical accuracy. I checked to make sure that my pages have a variety of multimodal texts – mostly linguistic and visual – and I checked to make sure I don’t have spelling and grammar errors.

Why I Did It

I checked thoroughly for grammatical and mechanical errors because I want my site to look professional and polished. Even if I have great visual and design elements, my blog will look sloppy if it’s filled with small errors.

During today’s class, I added three new pages to my site. I added one called Daily Posts, one called Contact Me, and a home page. I also added several widgets. To the sidebar I added a text box with a little about me and a link to the about me page, a search bar, and a follow button. I removed the search widget and the follow widget from the footer, and added contact information to the footer.  I also created a new category for posts, called “Daily Posts.”

Why I Did it:

I added the daily posts section to my blog as a way of categorizing all these posts I’m writing each day. It will make them easier to find, and make the blog much more organized. I added both the contact section in the footer and the contact page to make it easier for those viewing my blog to get in touch with me. I put a static page as my home page because it states the purpose of the blog and provides an introduction before people delve deeper into the blog. I categorized all the posts because it makes them more organized and easier for me to sort. 

2. Notebook- L, V

3. Folder- L, V

4. Hokie Passport- L, V, G

5. “Corriere del ticinio” pen- L, V

6. Water bottle- V

7. Candy Crush- L, V, S, A

8. 2048- L, V, S, A

9. Pic Stitch- V

10. Pinterest App- L, V, S, G

11. Pack of tissues- L, V, S

12. Eyeglasses pouch- V, S

Throughout all my texts, Linguistic and Visual were the most common modes of communication used. Most of my items had words on them, using a Linguistic mode, and most of them had colors or logos, using a Visual mode. The items that had patterns on them also used the Spatial mode of communication because of how the different designs were laid out. The texts that used the most kinds of modes were the apps on my phone, such as 2048. This uses visual in the words and numbers, the visual design of the blocks, the spatial aspect of trying to fit them together on the screen, and the aural mode of sound in the game. Other texts were far more simple- my water bottle, for example, uses just the visual elements of its color and its logo. I think my most unusual text was a pen that I have from a newspaper station in Switzerland called “Corriere del Ticino.”

Today, I changed a few things to customize my blog. First, I added categories for my posts to organize them. I also added a widget that would let people follow my blog. I also started to work on a menu for my site and updated the theme of my blog.

Why I Did It

When choosing my widgets, I chose to only add the “follow” option for now because I didn’t want to overwhelm my site. When I changed my theme, I chose one that better highlighted my main header image that I took while in Italy. In my current theme, the image takes up most of the first screen the viewer sees. I did this to keep the spatial and visual elements of multimodal design in mind – my main image is what takes up the most space in the design of the page.