Purpose:
I am taking this class as part of my Professional Writing minor.  Through this Writing and Digital Media class I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the motives most effective in communicating through Digital Media.  Through the WordPress site created in conjunction with Project 1, I hope to learn the effectiveness of the WordPress’ tools and applications.  Additionally, Project 1 has broadened my understanding of Internet based writing and media through my exploration of the features available.  My theme for this WordPress blog is to convey a simplistic and straightforward message that is both personal and professional.

Expectation:
As in all things, I am striving to present my best effort through this assignment.  Since no A+ is available, I have set my goal as an A and believe that my work is up to the “excellent” standard.

Modes of Communication:
Throughout the creating of this WordPress blog, our class has discussed and read about the five modes of communication.  The five modes of communication are linguistic, spatial, visual, gestural, and aural.  Through this blog I strived to use all five modes to peak the interest of and engage my audience.

The linguistic, spatial, and visual modes are found on every page of my site.  To address the linguistic mode, I choose a more formal tone of voice to meet my professional theme, but restricted my vocabulary to common words to convey a personable mood.  The layout of my site is evenly spaced and uses both black and white text and black and white images; these attributes contribute to the spatial and visual modes.  Originally, I had hoped to have a soft and natural green background, but was restricted by the limitations of WordPress.  Though I experienced this setback, I decided to create a sense of uniformity and continue with the black and white images.

The final two modes, gestural and aural, were more difficult to add to my blog.  I considered adding additional pages about my interest or a portfolio, but decided against it.  I found that adding a portfolio of my accounting or business projects would not relate to the needs of my user.  I considered adding a page for my interest, but settled on summarizing them on my About Me page, so that it does not distract from the rest of my WordPress site.  On my About Me page, I added an interest video that explains the organization Students Helping Honduras that I am involved in.  I plan to add a link to my fundraising page as well once it is up and running.

Features:
Additional content that helps my WordPress site stand out as an exceptional composition.  I choose my theme because it allowed the opportunity to feature different articles with title images that scroll across the main page of the site.  I currently have 3 images featured on my site.  One of the images is of a statue from the Dachau concentration camp.  I used the image not only to convey the pain of using WordPress, but also because it is one of the most interesting photographs on my computer and I through it added to my site aesthetically.  To make myself clear, this class and assignment are not comparable to the Holocaust in any way.    Additionally, my site allowed me the opportunity to include a logo.  I designed the logo used on my site as an art assignment in high school and decided to use it in place of a title, since I am not the biggest fan of my sites title.

Composition:
This site was designed with the user in mind.  The menu across the top of the site is easy to navigate.  The widgets included on the right bar are minimal, yet beneficial.  The posts uploaded are tagged with keywords that can be searched using the search bar widget.  After testing multiple archive widgets, I decided to use the calendar widget, because all my posts have uniform titles that specify the date of the class they relate to.  The contact form on my About Me page, is a final widget that helps my page standout from other.  The contact form is located on the About Me as a way for users to connect with me on a personal level.

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Today I spend a good amount of time editing and updating my blog to set a solid foundation for my blog.

What I Did:

The biggest change I made today was switching my theme from Goram to Superhero. I reconfigured and rewrote my about page after looking at the examples provided in the daily class notes.  I added several pages including a site information page and a projects page.  Since my class has not started working on the various projects due throughout the semester, I nested projects 2,3, and 4 so they appear in a drop down menu when Projects is selected.  I looked through the widgets available and selected several.

Why I Did It:

I switched because they both has similar simplistic ideals that accompany their clean appearance, but Superhero provides a wider array of opportunities to customize the blog.  I nested the project pages after seeing the idea when I was demoing the Superhero theme.  I was frustrated that a blank page appeared when the parent page was selected.  With some help I found a way to customize my menu by creating a custom heading labeled projects and deleted the black page that was acting as a placeholder.  I decided to select several more widgets than I anticipated, I chose Archive, Top Rated, and Calendar.  I plan to delete two in the near future after deciding which post organization widget is the most beneficial.

Opportunities:

The Superhero template theme allows for different headings to be used, featured posts to be highlighted, and some pages to appear without the widget sidebar.

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