Website Development

Developing the website was easier than I suspected it would be, thanks to Google's user-friendly system. I'd never made a website before - the closest I had come was creating a blog on Tumblr, but that was a very simplified process compared to this. For example, I still haven't figured out how to customize themes there, but I learned how to create a custom color palette both for my website and this blog.

I feel a lot more comfortable creating and organizing pages for a website now, although I still don't like writing content. I think that's just a feature of my personality - I am very good at explaining things, but I am less comfortable with creating introduction posts, especially when I do not know who my audience is. It was especially frustrating finding a balance between me, as the author, addressing all the different possible audiences (my students, my students' parents, employers or potential employers, other educators, anyone who stumbles across my site) when they, as the audience, will be reading it as an individual when it was written for a group. It would be like giving a presentation to an auditorium where you know there's a big audience out there, but you can't see them, and no one in the audience can see any other audience members, so everyone in your audience thinks that you are speaking directly to them.

I find that frustrating. I like seeing my audience - knowing who they are and being able to interact directly with them, not just shouting into the darkness.

I think I may actually have a class website, although I hadn't really considered it as an option before this class, although I need to think about whether I will revamp this one or create a new one. I've recently decided to become an English as a Second Language teacher as well as a Latin teacher, and so I would want to include information on that as well as on Latin. Right now, my website is solely focused on Latin. Unfortunately, I won't start any ESL classes until second session this summer, so I won't even know enough to be able to include ESL material in the Web 2.0 class this summer.