Building a Website

 For the final class project, students were instructed on how to build a portfolio website. This website will be used to promote various different pieces of work that Bianca Sorci has done during her time as a communications student so far. A majority of the work is public relations related. The goal of this portfolio website is to showcase the work that she is most proud of while networking at the same time. While Bianca has created a portfolio website on a browser-based platform like Word Press and Adobe Portfolio, she has never used anything like Dreamweaver. Showing her work on a website created on Dreamweaver is a promotion within itself since it shows experience in learning how to build a website.

 The social media project that was the most helpful when it came to making a website was the wikiHow project that students did as their first project. For the wikiHow project, the class had to do some basic coding. Having to learn basic coding for the first project helped students get some experience working with code. This prepared them for their final project because it wasn’t entirely new. Although the coding was still difficult, it would have been even more of a challenge if there hadn't been a little introduction to coding thanks to the wikiHow assignment.

 On Bianca's website, she included links to her Twitter account and a link to this blog. This gives people an opportunity to get to know Bianca as a person. Anyone reading the website also has the opportunity to contact Bianca through Twitter if that’s their main way of communicating. It is important to include numerous ways to be contacted instead of just providing an email address.

 Designing this site was challenging yet educational. Bianca is a public relations major who has never taken any media production-related classes up until now. The most similar class that she has taken to this was probably a visual communication class. Going into this website design project was daunting because it was not like anything that Bianca has ever worked on before. Getting used to using Dreamweaver was one of the most difficult aspects of the project. Even basic coding can be difficult because of how detailed every line of code is. By changing one slight thing, the entire website could possibly change. 

 Adding pictures to the website was generally easy to do. Bianca included a mixture of different documents and pictures. The challenge with uploading documents was how small the words looked on each document when you first glance at the page. Of course, that is the purpose of linking a bigger version that will pop up when you click on each document. However, it would have been ideal to be able to make the words look clearer even after taking the steps to make them web-ready.

Bianca is glad that she had to do this project because it broadened her knowledge as a communications major. Learning to build a portfolio website is not necessarily something she would learn to do on her own, so having it as an assignment was helpful. All in all, creating this website was a valuable experience that be can taken with all of the students into their future communications classes.