Building My Final Vision Project

As I have been working through my final vision project there have been a number of challenges.  The first and biggest problem was being healthy enough to be able to work on my project!  It has been a rough couple of weeks with our book fair, student conferences, report card printing problems, being sick and then having to take care of my kids who were sick afterwards and not sleeping the night.  Now that I am finally able to work on my project I have found the process for the most part relatively painless with a few bumps along the way.

I have chosen to use Weebly to create my website on inquiry based learning (click here to view my work in progress).  I have used Weebly in the past and I am quite familiar with it.  Since the last time I worked with Weebly there have been some changes and after searching for quite some time to find the missing features that I was used to using, I found a tutorial online and I was able to adapt easily to the improvements made to the program.  I have had a few other formatting issues but nothing particularly troublesome. I had thought about trying out a new program to gain some experience using different programs but I am happy that I didn’t because I could not afford using any extra time to learning a new program.  I would still like to try using other programs in the future to see if they have different features and design that may be more appealing.

I am still amazed at how long it takes to do the research!  I had already started collecting some links but deciding which sites to use can also be time consuming.  Due to lack of time, I have not even begun searching for sites in French.  My goal was to provide links in French and English but I will have to work on that at a later time.  It was also difficult selecting sites that would appeal to a larger number of teachers and not to just a few teachers.  It was important that the information was easy to read and not too academic or tedious.  If teachers have to work too hard to find the information they are looking for then they will give up.  The key word that I keep referring back to for this site is user-friendly.

The last struggle I had was finding ways to make the website visually appealing, professional looking, and easy to navigate.  This part of the process can also take up a lot of time.  The appearance of the website can be almost as important as the content.  Teachers may not want to explore the website if it is not easy to navigate and visually appealing.  Since I am not a designer, it has been a bit of a slow process. In the end, I opted to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible.

I truly enjoy creating websites but finding the time to make it the way I want is a struggle that will always be there.  I have to keep in mind that websites are a work in progress. They need regular maintenance like checking links as well as adding new links and making sure that the information is up to date and relevant.  I need to keep this in mind as I’m finishing up my website!