During the EDU 314 class this semester, the biggest way in which I grew was taking on new challenges and teaching myself certain tricks and techniques in order to go the extra mile. I am a bit of a perfectionist, so having a visually appealing website from the very beginning was important to me. I wanted vertical links and tables on my pages while still having the website look professional and sleek. I quickly got excited about the things I could learn and create with my website. Therefore, I started teaching myself how to create tables and rollover links. I looked at other professional websites that were visually appealing to try and get a good color scheme. I have a lot of white on my page because I often found that websites done with a colored background didn’t look as professional to me. A lot of white space gives it a clean and easy-to-navigate page. I like the black and white color scheme, but since I knew I was going to have a lot of white, I wanted some other kind of bright color with the white to contrast it well. So once I found websites that showed me how to create tables and rollover links, I kind of taught myself the rest. I feel very comfortable with all of the programs we used throughout the semester and I’m interested in creating another website, better than the one I created for this class. Now that I’ve had a lot of practice with web creation for the whole semester, there are techniques and “spice” that I would want to add to my page. I have a large number of pages on my website, so going back and changing them all now would be time consuming, so I would like to start another website in order to try out these new techniques. This is probably my biggest frustration…that I started so early and completed so many projects and pages ahead of time, it is hard to go back and make the changes to everything so every page is consistent. I know that I could make a better website with even more information and I hope to do so in the future.

This course was helpful for me on a more personal level. I started creating websites when I was twelve or thirteen years old, but haven’t tried to make one in years. It was an early hobby for me, and this course renewed that interest for me. I’m enthusiastic about making more websites and using the programs we got to use in the future. My favorite was probably the Digital Photo Story and there are several occasions that I would like to use that program. My mother has already asked for my services in making a photo story for my grandparent’s 50^th wedding anniversary. I’d also like to use this program for making gifts for family members and friends. Finally, I could use this program to show a photo story at a wedding, which I am really excited about.