Creating a Website

Building a website is a great idea for people who have something they want to share with the masses.  It's great for business, personal use, or anything in between!  I have wanted to create a website for a long time now, but I wasn't sure what topic I would cover.  While websites that go over a lot of topics CAN be fun to look at, often-times they are just overwhelming for me and leave me unsatisfied.  I am glad creating a website was an assignment, so I could think about what something that I would potentially do in the future.  I made a website on the topic I would use if I were to ever have my own business...career counseling!  While this is a VERY broad topic, I tried to make the website in a way that would not be overwhelming.  It is called Career and Education Services.  Instead of including tons of topics (which both career and education can have), I just put one or two things, and included links to some additional helpful websites.  If I ever expanded the site as a business, I would take the time to organize it well, so I could more information.  The website is careerandeducationservices.weebly.com -- check it out! While this was a relatively simple endeavor for someone who has never created a website before, there are things about Weebly that I did find challenging or frustrating (like the fact that I can't make a unique design on each page).  Luckily most of it went very smoothly.  Weebly is definitely a site I would recommend to a non tech-savvy person.

Microsoft Form

This week I created a form using Microsoft Word.  I wasn't even aware of how these types of forms were made.  Now that I know, I hope I don't have to create them very often in the future.  If I had used the help button or a tutorial I am sure it would have been much faster, but I chose to do it through trial and error.  I finally realized I had to right-click properties to add in items for drop-down menus, AND that I couldn't test it out unless I took it out of design mode.  I found this to be much more difficult than the Survey Monkey form, which creates everything easily. I hope to have a nice tutorial to use if I have to create them again in the future.  Whew! Glad that is over!

effective presentations

This week we had an "ugly slide" and were told to transform it into something better.  I used Microsoft PowerPoint for the purpose of time-I am already very familiar with it.  Eventually I want to learn to use Prezi; I heard about it by someone who works in the media industry.  I tend to not put a lot of extras into my presentations using PowerPoint because I find them distracting when I am trying to present.  I know they make a nice unique presentation though.  I thought it was interesting in the lecture that one should use no more than 30 slides for an hour long presentation.  I don't like too many slides because it is hard to keep up; however, I also don't like to have many words on a slide (just key words really), so I think there is a fine line.  Readability is definitely the most important consideration for me when making a PowerPoint.  It is frustrating to be in an audience and not be able to see the presentation because there are too many words and the background and word colors are too close together.