First Post!

Welcome to my first ever blog post! One of my units at Murdoch University requires me to keep a blog of my learning experiences throughout the class. Though I've never been very electronically savvy, always a pen and paper kind of girl, it's been a lot easier to get the hang of than I expected. I've even made my own website, though it's still a little rough - now all that's left to do is the research! I had thought, up until now, that creating and designing my own site would be the hard part of the assignment but it seemed too easy if anything. I had no clue where to start until I looked at some examples from previous students and professors and that cleared everything up, all of a sudden I had a hundred different ideas that I couldn't possibly cram into one site. I used weebly to create the page, as it seemed simple and it it had a nice look to it. The site itself had a tutorial and checklist to go through as you planned the site, so all my paper and pencil diagrams and drawings were useless as the design I ended up going with was nowhere near my original plan.

While creating the site you are given the option to either upload your own photos, choose from a gallery within Weebly, or add them to the site from another page using the URL. This final option is very useful as it gives you a much wider expanse of images that are automatically accredited on your site in a footnote as they are uploaded. The galleries within the page were quite limited, as the free options were of low quality and were often very irrelevant to what I had searched for. It's quite frustrating to search for "whiteboards" and be presented with a hundred or so photos of people playing sport, with not an in-focus whiteboard to be seen anywhere. There were, of course, other images of higher quality - in fact they were exactly what I was looking for, however the copyright limitations on them required you to pay $5 or so in order to use them on your site. $5!? Think I have that  kind of money? Ridiculous!

Despite my ranting, I would encourage anyone to make their own site, even if no one ever sees it or it's just for your friends and family. It was a lot more fun than I thought it could be and it's such an easy and efficient way of documenting your studies or your travels, even just everyday activities.