Web.Authoring.and.Design: Eng 342
Rhetoric and Web Design huh? Who knew they had things in common
Junior year!
So, now that I finally made a decision on what I was going to do with the rest of my life, I began to get into the nitty gritty of my major and its core classes. Over the summer, I talked with family and friends about my new found major, and people talked with me about possibly picking up a minor in journalism. So I looked into it, saw that there was an eletronic journalism minor, and thought that it would be extremely beneficial to have a solid background in how the computer part of my career will work. Unfortunately, I was too far into my college career to pick up a minor and finish it in time, so my advisor suggessted taking classes that I would in that minor and still get the experience I desired. And, well, thats how I landed in English 342!
learning.how.the.web.works.in.my.favor
I've.always thought that I knew stuff about computers and how to use the web. Well, once again, I thought wrong. Our first assignment in the class was to write on a blog, and to me, that just seemed.dorky. I am the going shopping, getting your hair and nails done, buying tons of shoes type of gal, so to be asked to "blog" daily was one thing, but to ask me to write about web based things too? I was a little taken back by how to tie.in.my.English.major and interests with this web."stuff", but the more I read and thought about it, using my creative interpretation skills to tie in this meaning and that, it became more and more easier. I learned how to put links into words, pictures on the web, and now, how.to.build .a.website!
I am hoping to not only use this site to show where.I've.come.from.in.school, but it is also giving me experience I could use in the working world with technology. I am currently using dreamweaver to build my site, and I can now build a site myself, as well as know the components of the program that will allow me to navigate with other potential sites I will be asked to edit. Knowing how to use and write on a blog is beneficial, especially since I may work at a magazine or newspaper after I graduate that is designed to be online, using blogs for their entries. We are also going to learn how to put a streaming video online as well, something I hear is difficult, but important to know too. The idea.of.rhertoric is tied into the course material as well, encouraging us to build an online identity, whether it be professional, student, or just for fun.
Links
If you look to your left, there is already a link for my blog I started back in August. This is the link for it again.
This is the website for our class.
This is the course syllabus, showing our three major assignments as well as the online reading material that helps explain the uses of web design and how to design it for your audience
Here is a school website Professor Hawk has built through Mason.
This is Professor Hawk's academic blog
This site is a comprehensive site with all of his relative links and sites he has either created or helped compile and write information for.
We had to do a site specification document for our potential website, trying to plan it out and see how we wanted to structure the site pertaining to the pages that it would include as well as our audiences.
Once we developed our ideas for our website, a user test document was designed to see how our peers in the class could potentially use our site and really test out our true purposes for the site.