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My relationship with technology is more a fascination with the people writing code. The hacker communities. I’m not talking about phone scandals and e-mail hacking. When I look at graffiti artists, I see hackers. I see a community of people who are making their own tools and subverting systems to tell stories.  ~Evan Roth

Designing Your WebSite

You need to decide on the impact, meanings, and message that you want your website to convey.  Those decisions must encompass more than just the words that you write; the medium is also your message.  From your logo to the fonts to the images that you choose, it all has meaning.   Let yourself experience the full range of that process and by all means, try and enjoy it!


This is the image that inspired this website…
This website began with graffiti letters.  It was later collaged with more graffiti-style words to create the first image that you see on the landing page's slideshow.  Like the epigraph above suggests, graffiti offers a frame for thinking about technology: subverting systems to tell stories. 
I wanted to try green, black, and grayscale after I saw the way that Christian Nunes designed his ePortfolio in fall 2013 in English 101. I have never used these colors together so this was an opportunity to see what I could design with such a scheme.

Your website Starts with a Template . . .

Unlike Facebook and many other social networking spaces, you are not merely designing a wall here that works, well, let's face it, like everyone else's wall.  You are designing an experience.  Though the themes that package websites can be very constricting, there is enough flexibility here that you can take it over.  Work your template down to the bone and make it do what you want and need it to do. 

There are so many themes to choose from on this platform.  Once you choose that theme, you will have even more design choices: the background image, the highlight color, the fonts (site title, navigation menu, headline, subheadline, paragraph titles, paragraph texts, links, buttons, block quotes, captions, etc).  No two websites do and mean the same things and so they should not look alike either.  When you make your choices, think rhetorically.  Here is a run-through of a mental/rhetorical process for choosing themes and making graphic decisions.

That Hotness!

I love this theme. That stark black and white image with your title in the middle.  Wowzers!  As much as I love this design, it couldn't work for this website.  I designed this website with students in mind.  As much as I love dark backgrounds, they are not visually accessible to diverse audiences with diverse needs.  If a student needs to visit this website at least twice a week (as opposed to my personal website where visitors are not as frequent), then I can't impede users' access with dark design. And while having that opening image would have been HOT, I need to create as many easy points of entry to the content that students need rather than give extra clicks and extra stops.  But just you wait… Ima crank out this theme somehow, somewhere, soon!

CaN I Hack This One? No!

I had to go in and play with this one.  I like the look but, like already discussed, I could not choose a dark background.  I was hoping that I would be able to change the block colors without having to spend time changing the code. It did force me to look at the CSS for this platform but I wasn't motivated to actually make changes to the code.

Instead… I kept looking.

At this point, you should notice something critical here.  I spent a considerable amount of time designing this website before I even had a single webpage posted, image uploaded, or a theme chosen.  You are designing even BEFORE the website takes on its life.  If it takes time, you are on the right track.  Welcome to web design!

The Best of both worlds?

You would think I would have learned something by now, but NO!  I was still stuck on stupid looking at these dark themes. Maybe, just maybe, I could just find a dark background with a gray or white background so that the words are easier to read.  No such luck!

This theme above looked like it might work.  However, the tabs at the top just didn't look good at all to me.  The spacing between the top tabs took up a lot of space (the vertical spacing). That might work for some websites that only have a few tabs, but this site has too many tabs that need to all be visible at once.  

At least I knew that I was getting closer, because I was defining more and more of what I was looking for!

Almost, but not quite!

I like this template, because you can have a background image that fades into the pages and posts.  Hotness right there! But, again, I ran into the issue with the top tabs.  The spacing between the top tabs took up a lot of space (the vertical spacing). Like before, I figured out that this site has too many tabs that need to all be visible.

Instead of losing my will to live, I decided that I needed a simple, clean template.  I also had to forego my desire to have a website with tabs at the left side rather than the top. I settled on a template that gave me a little space to add a top/background image.  Utility won at the end of the day.  There are too many tabs that need to be displayed and diverse students with diverse learning needs who need to access this site.  So here we are!  
The four columns above offer you a meta-discussion of how the templating and designing of this website was done.  Remember, website design is a space for us to implement the rhetorical awareness that we have developed in this class.  The way that you set up a website is a rhetorical process.

Mistakes to Avoid...

  1. Don't use a PDF as a webpage.  Design an actual page.  PDFs are for attachments and the like.
  2. Make your weblinks a different color.  When these weblinks change color after a visit, users find the site easier to manage and engage.
  3. Do NOT write a wall of text.  This is NOT simple design.  This is just bad design.  Use subheadings, bulleted lists, short paragraphs, images, etc.
  4. Make sure your font size is large enough for readers of varying abilities to read. 
 
                                                                                                                Please see "Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design" by Jakob Nielsen for more…


If I were a really good coder, this video at the left is the kind of work that I would build and design… Thass, right!  Brooklyn, we go hard!  


Unfortunately, my skills are simply not at this level…not yet, at least.  


In the meantime, I can design a website such as this one and you can too!