I have finally finished my website, and I have to say that I'm pretty proud of everything that I've accomplished! I chose to use www.wix.com as the host site for my page, as it was a free site with a lot of awesome graphics, and a lot of flexibility in organizing my information which allowed me to change around things as I saw fit.
In the beginning of my website creation, I struggled trying to find a ready-made background that I liked, but once I realized how easy it was to change the backgrounds, borders, fonts, colors, etc., I felt free to truly create. I found that adding content to the pages I wanted, was not nearly as challenging as I originally thought, and I loved exploring the various clip cart, available photos, and animations (although I didn't use any within the designs that I had) that were available to me. I also couldn't believe how easy it was to add content from YouTube! I think that this will make my life so much easier, as I can now post the video clips that I show in class, and all of my students can have access to them! In the past, I've had students come early to school, or stay after school to try and make up the work that they'd missed while they were absent, but the ability to post all of the homework assignments, notes, videos, labs and worksheets all in the same place should help make my lives, and the lives of my students so much easier!
Since this was a new experience for me, there were definitely a number of things that I struggled with. My biggest and most important lesson was that I found that you needed to frequently save your work. There were a number of occasions where my Internet connection simply shut down, undoing everything that I had worked to hard to complete. I also found it challenging to add content to pages, as there were times that I tried to drag an image or text box to a new page, and I ended up scrolling to a whole other page altogether. Something that still baffles me, is the addition of various widgets, and in my case, a "Unit Converter Widget." I could not for the life of me figure out how to format the size of the widget on my page so that the entire converter showed up, and after a number of unsuccessful tries to resize the box, I simply gave up and deleted it from my page. The final thing that I'll need to explore further, is the overall size of the content on my web page. When I open the site from my husband's laptop,
I am very excited about everything that I've done, and I can't wait to show it off to my students! I think that this website allows someone without any computer programming skills the ability to create a professional looking site, in a fairly user friendly way. I still would like to continue to add more content to my page, potentially even a separate page that contains only Labs and Homework Assignments. I would love to include more videos, and science links for all of the areas of content, not simply "Chemistry," like how I have now. Even though I love everything I've done so far, I know that it will continue to be a work in progress for as long as I have the site up and running, as there are always more fun things to add, and improvements to make! :-)
