As an English major, I think it goes without saying that I have absolutely zero prior experience with HTML and coding in general. These past two weeks have been a little stressful in that regard. I didn’t want to destroy the website I was trying to create. I have pages of notes from W3Spaces on the basics of HTML as a reference sheet. Writing it down helps me remember how it’s meant to work. It was helpful for me to have the W3Spaces guide. I knew how to look up what I wanted to do, and the examples provided helped me make sure I didn’t completely screw it up. (I’m particularly pleased with myself that I managed to add a link that opened in a new tab rather than in the same tag.)
I also figured that I would take the recommendations to heart. I didn’t make a single change without saving and looking at my site immediately afterward. This came in handy in one instance: I had issues getting the last image to display. I don’t know what I did wrong, so I just removed the element and retyped it. Whatever the problem was, I fixed it.
While I continue to build and customize my website, I don’t want to fiddle too much with the template code. I’m deathly scared of breaking it and not knowing how to fix it. If I can’t figure out what it correlates to on the preview, I don’t want to touch it until I’m more confident in what I’m doing.
This week, I learned how to add images, change text, add links, make those links open in a new tab, and italicize text. In the future, I want to remove the images, particularly the one of myself. I want to focus my website on my writing, the death positivity movement, and what my art has to do with the movement. However, since these elements are important to the assignment, they will stay for the duration of the assignment. I also use a pen name with my writing (V.Z. Addams) that I included in the URL and the page title, but for now, I have my real name on the page. It will get changed.
Next week, I want to learn how to customize the colors and fonts on my site. I also want to get actual content in each of the tabs. The “Resume” section is going to function as a more in-depth version of the “Previous Publications” on the side-bar. I want to provide links for where readers can visit the publication sign. I want the Portfolio to contain previous writing samples. I have no idea how, but I want to make it easy to navigate between pieces rather than by endless scrolling. That may be above my skill level, so it’s more of a distant want rather than a goal.
I’m realizing that it’s difficult to map what content I have into the website structure needed for this class. My “resume” isn’t a traditional resume, because I’m not seeking a traditional job. I’ll make it work, but I might find myself not getting as many As as I’m used to.