Sunday, September 23, 2007

Portalportal

Final Portaportal web book marker site complete:
Go to : portaportal.com
login: snj8468
password: johnson3

I enjoyed sharing bookmarks with my teammates and adding cool new stuff I didn't know about. Creating this site also gave me a great feeling of organization. It allowed me to categorize all my areas of interest and look at the areas that needed more information.
So far, portaportal has been a great new technology tool for me as well as my co-workers.

Journey into Web Making

Journey into Web Design


Lesley University

ECOMP 7007

September 4, 2007

Nancy Story



As a technology novice, I have limited practice with web creations and designs. My journey has been an interesting experience with numerous bumps along the way. I only realized how difficult it was when I found myself half way through it!
As I began to unshelter this web design journey, I wanted to create a site that would be useful to special needs children, their parents and advocates. I wanted the site to portray a since of compassion and encompass information that would normally be found on several sites. I chose information which was most current. I added operational poems and photos of my own students. The parents of these students were very excited! I spent a lot of time researching many special needs web sites, many of which were international. I noticed that Sweden and Germany in particular had many creative sites which provided viewers with an abundance of free information and downloadable software.
Unlike American sites, it appears that Europe provides more “free stuff” in the special needs area. After viewing these sites, I was motivated and convinced that if I dug deep enough, I too could find “free stuff” available to the special needs population in our country. After probing further, I began to find a plethora of information available for parents and educators.
After many days of downloading various information and tools, I began the arduous journey into web design. Originally, I wanted to use Dream weaver but found it to be very technical and not very easy to navigate. I chose Weebly because it seemed so much simpler and user friendly. Weebly appears fairly simple but lacks more design capabilities than dreamwaever. Weebly’s font button is tricky so while editing, it is difficult to tell what size the font is actually going to be! This stumbling block created many hours of frustration and unnecessary guess work. Additionally, there lacked variety when it involved the web design layout. There were very few options to choose from so the choices only allowed certain one text to picture ratio, one title to picture or only a stand alone picture. There was no creative way to copy and paste inside the picture box space or add picture credits. As a result, the pictures are caption less and have big spaces around them. It was annoying not to be able to have choices to add text to areas of the photos. Moreover, the pictures upload into an oversized frame that will not seem to format into the frame!
More wearisome still, the cutting, pasting and cookie problems. Cookies on, cookie off, no cookies, too many cookies! Finally, I could not get the feed burner nor the built in RSS feed to make feeds for my site. One of the newest problems encountered consist of the inability to get fonts to size up consistently. Also, font colors are very difficult to match up when adding new materials to the page. Often, I would change, cut or paste one page to a different page to reformat the sequence and this information would delete itself.
As of yesterday, September 18, 2007, the last two pages of the site will not publish at all yet when I do an edit check, they look just fine! I have emailed Weebly three times and they are “working on it”. So far, it has been an exhausting journey with a lot of bumps along the way. Concerned for others who might be in the same predicament, I began to surf the net in search of reviews and feedback. It was interesting to see that there were many users having similar problems but over all, thought the site was awesome. Others claimed that no one can compare to Google page creator and del.icio.us. Weebly itself also revealed a news release in which they acknowledged the problems, appreciated the advice and announced that they were in the works of “tweaking” the bugs out.
Aside from all the tribulations while creating this web site, it was an incredibly satisfying and fun undertaking. I have gained a great deal of satisfaction in providing an all encompassing, specialized site that provides a wide spectrum of tools and information which will help and assist this area of the population.