E-Portfolios

If I had to critique myself and give myself a grade, I would give myself a rather good grade. I don't really know how I have done compared to the other people in the class, but I know that I have worked hard and spent multiple hours on designing my webpages, much less the hours spent on writing the papers. I have sat down and thought up of a general guideline that I wanted my entire website to follow and (thanks to BPOD) I believe that I was able to execute that guideline fairly well. Considering that this is really only about the second time I've created a website (first time using this software) I think that my website looks well done. I would want the person looking at my site to say that it looks like I spent a lot of time on it and it paid off. 

Now, I'm definitely not saying that what I have created looks professionally done, and I'm not about to send it into a competition about web designs. Obviously it has its flaws. For one thing, I managed to overlook the BPOD of alignment. It says that having your article flush to one side is stronger than all over the place or in the middle. Not that I didn't know about this (I did), I purposely did not implement this rule into my website. I felt that having my writing to the left side is boring, and that having it on the right side would have been confusing, so I compromised. By having the borders on both sides equal to each other, I think that it more than balances out the issue of  the middle text as a bad thing. 

When I think about my homepage, I know that it needs a little work. At first I thought it was fine, but after some encouragement from a certain someone I think that I could whip up something a little more creative. Like what is stated in the blog outline, the homepage is what sets up the entire webpage. I can put more thought into what I am writing, maybe a bio about myself with a picture of me, then I can explain what my website is all about. That should give my potential readers a little more information about what they are planning to get into, so to speak.

The online portfolio, at least in my opinion, is an extension of my writing. By implementing visuals and different types of text, I am able to fully describe what I am writing about. This is definitely better than having just a collection of papers loosely bundled together to represent a semester's worth of work. Plus, by having this online portfolio, I am able to better reach a larger audience (that is, anyone that happens to stumble across my webpage and is able to understand english). As noted earlier, I believe that the combination of text and visuals helps the readers better understand what they are reading by actually seeing a visual description of what they are reading about. It can even give them an idea about what they are about to read even before they read it!