Going into making a website, I had no clue what I was doing. I thought that I would struggle to make anything look nice due to my lack of knowledge in computers as a whole and I’m proud that I was able to make a website that in my opinion looks somewhat decent. In the last week, the website has undergone a lot of change and a majority of that change can be seen in the homepage. I got around to removing the broken links at the bottom of the homepage while shrinking the size of footers by half, I had to update many of the links due to them being out of date. I initially wanted to change the background of the homepage to something different since it was originally all white, However, when I found out how to change the background, I only found out how to insert a photo since changing the color ended up messing up the photos. I changed the background to black background with little stars because I thought it reflected me more than a whiter background. The biggest thing I’m proud of is the Assessments and Blogs page. Beforehand, you needed the direct link to get to any page and I thought about making links at the top of the screen but I was talking to a family member about it and they suggested compiling all the links on a single page. I tried it out and I liked it a lot. It also made the process of adding the individual links on the bottom of each page a lot easier as the list was already there.
One of the blog posts I made that I am most proud of is the post about the Holocaust museum. I chose to visit the Holocaust museum because I thought that it would help me learn more about the consequences of a high trust society which means when the general public has high trust in the government as well as the consequences of a government enforcing “moral purity.” This is a topic I stumbled upon when researching something else for fun and I thought that going to the Holocaust museum would help. I’m especially proud of what I had to say in the post because even though I had confirmation to go over the 800 words, I still struggled to write down all the ideas I had and there were a few things I had to leave out. While working on this post, I had to think about how digital tools affected how we learn because I had always dismissed this idea since I was always interested in history related things, however I was constantly thinking does the lack of technology in the museum effect how I and the people I went with see history and I see that it does as I and those I went with agreed that the lack of technology made it harder to be more engaged.
Holocaust Museum and it’s digital tools
One of the skills assessments that stood out to me was the StoryMapJS where I talked about the political groups and different ideas that were going around in the Ottoman empire. I chose this topic because it was closely connected to my bigger topic involving the Republic of Turkey. The Story Map was meant to talk about the political forces that were active and what they wanted to do while also talking about the history that they influenced. I figured out that I prefer StoryMapJS over Google maps due to how linear it was since I felt like how the person viewing my Story Map couldn’t jump ahead and get lost. The story Map stands out to me because this is something with one hundred percent confidence that I want in my final project.
StoryMap JS: Those that Influence Anatolia
Overall I’m proud of what I created since I was coming into this with no experience however, there are a few things I would like to improve upon. While I think that the home page is fine, I could imagine others thinking it looks rushed and unfinished and if I had more time I would like to go and edit it. I’m also confused about how to edit things individually since most of my edits seem to change everything such as the background. I would also like to get rid of the past posts on the home page but I worry that there wouldn’t be anything on the home page if I removed it. I generally think the posts are fine as they are but I wish I could add more to assessment pages as they usually only hold the assignment such as the timeline and nothing else. I think if I were to do this again with a different topic I would go with the idea of a high trust society and moral purity in Prussia and how that affected Germany in the world wars.