This week task was to create our own web page by either using edublogs or another website software. I chose to go with edublogs as they are supported by the university and therefore would have support available.
Choosing a theme was difficult and I went through several to find the correct one, eventually choosing ‘Weather’. I think this one has good menu controls as well and prominent images making it look aesthetically pleasing.
Deciding whether to go with posts or pages for the weekly summaries was as simple as testing with tags and categories. Categories can be added to menus which is ideal when using widgets to create a side menu. Therefore the best method was to go with posts, using categories to organise in the menus – possibly using some tags to help with searches – I’ll update on this later.
I felt that the side menu needed to include all of the week posts, although this may change, and so I used a widget called ‘Custom Menu’ which allows me to create an new menu and individually control what appears. For ease of access for the website I also added a site-wide search bar.
While Photoshop is a more powerful software, I don’t have access to it at home and therefore used a few online resizing software; which I found https://resizeimage.net/ to be the best. It has options for cropping, rotating, resizing with aspect ratios and by pixel count as well as scaling afterwards. However the most important is the ‘Optimize you Image’ option, which changes the compression of the image, allowing you to save space and decrease loading times on the website.
In order to not loose track of images they were correctly named with their location on website as well as their pixel size. They are saved in Google drive so accessible everywhere if they need altering.
Main Images on menu – 2500×500 – Since these are main menu images they can be slightly larger than the smaller thumbnail images set up for the individual posts – These images are well under 200KB while still being of reasonable quality – JPG images were used instead of JPEG or PNG in order to keep the sizes down, due to the limitation of edublogs allowing 1GB of media. These images are set under Appearance>Market Settings>Slider Settings>Enable Slider
Thumbnail Images – 650×600 – An easy size to remember and is what I will use for each of my posts Featured Image – the featured image is what is displayed with the post
> Correction – Correct Pixel count is 650 x 570
In order to test the categories and posts etc. work I created a new post under each category and applied the link to the menus – any problems should be discovered when further using the website in the future.
A video test post was also added, showing one of my video tutorials on YouTube. This process was very easy and went as follows: Copy and paste the YouTube URL into the media tab on create new post>Add tags and categories and a title and it should pop up in a post
