My First (Good) Website!

Okay, this blog was started for the Information Technology in Libraries class, but I'm talking here about my subject guide for the Reference and User Services class. It was supposed to be a proper web site for a the presentation, but my first attempt looked more like this:

I call this a website... You can call it a PowerPoint slide

It was, um, okay. When I finally got it up as a real, live site, it looked more like this:

A tremendous improvement!

The thing about all of this is that it has given me a far greater degree of respect for those who do this for a living. When you go to my site (which I know you shall... just make sure it opens in a different view so you can keep reading this), you'll see that it is simple, no-nonsense and conversational. Well, that picture is a little nonsense, but my scanner is being churlish; that's the most "professional" looking picture I have on this machine.

I built the site on Google Sites first. I chose this one because it did what I wanted, and not because I found it inherently superior to Weebly or Wordpress. I looked at both of those sites (as well as a couple of other options), and I saw that Google offered customizing functions right on introduction page. If I wanted just to plug my content into a premade template, Weebly would be perfect. Instead, I wanted to tinker a little.

Also, Google Sites worked with my Google log-in. For that matter, though, so does Blogger, but I'll get to that a little later.

I had to "cheat" a bunch of stuff. If you see something that looks like a link to facebook, know that it's a fake. I'd like to make it a real thing, but I can't find the gadget to do that. Yeah, that's a weak excuse, I know, but there you are.

All of the "resource" pages except the one for writing are each a separate Blogger site that I set up. I couldn't find any other way to get comments to appear. This is where the Blogger mention above comes in. As a little bit of a rant, I was disappointed that the same comments that are on this blog cannot be plugged into a Google Site page, but I know that's how things work. Google didn't develop this blog site so much as acquire it, and I made it work.

...That's enough on the subject of building the site. I'll post something in a few days about my impression of subject guides in general.