Week # 4 Blog Design and Website Platforms

My New Blog Design and Website

After learning about good and Bad Blog Design this week, I began to notice all of the ways that my design was not very effective. For example, my fonts and images often were not sized appropriately, my text was too cramped, and I had several typos and poorly written sentences all of which took away from the message of my posts. I also had a shameful amount of beginner mistakes such as underlining things that weren't links, and *blush* having light text on a dark background. Using my knew knowledge of white space, the importance of drawing attention to content, and the role of colors from 5 Keys to Make Your Blog Visually Awesome, I made several changes to my blog.

First Impressions

The first thing I did was change the theme and images in my blog because those are the things that viewers will see immediately. I decided on a simple theme: A white text background on a library webpage background. This was because my previous theme and background were too distracting, and unrelated to the blog's message. Next, I made my images smaller so that they fit nicely with the text, without taking attention away from it. After realizing that I had been sizing everything based on my huge 17 inch laptop screen, I also adjusted the width of my blog to make it more compatible with smaller computer screens and mobile devices.

Text Content

After fixing the general appearance of my blog, I made sure the font types, sizes, and colors were all uniform in each of my blog posts. I also got rid of the cramped appearance of my text by spacing the lines and paragraphs neatly. Next, I fixed the text size organization in my blog by making headings the largest, followed by subheadings and content. Taking advice from 5 Beginning Blogging Mistakes You Can Fix, I got rid of anything that said "click here", and just kept the links.

Layout and Gadgets

To improve ease of access, I followed the design of other attractive blogs and put the search bar and blog archive on the right sidebar. I kept other information viewers might want such as my profile information, number of views, and a link to report abuse in the footer, so that it wouldn't be a distraction.

My Google Site

This part of the assignment proved difficult for me because I am accustomed to using HTML and WordPress to make websites. Once I watched the Google Sites tutorial and played around with the features for a while I was able to make a cool website that I think looks great on mobile devices. Using the tutorial, I gave my homepage a header image with a welcome message, a link to Nasa with a map, a calendar, and links to my other pages. In my other pages I added captioned and clickable images, text content and a video. Here's the link:

https://sites.google.com/view/fateofstars/home