My Experience

Creating a web space was a new experience for me. To be honest I was a little worried after reading the assignment instructions. My first thought was how am I going to do that! The instructions given helped, and laid everything out. That made it a lot easier for me. To begin I watched the video on how to set up a blog. The video showed me step-by-step how to make my blog, how to customize it, and how to set up multiple pages. A blog is a website where a user can record opinions and information as often as they like. You can also post pictures and videos. There are many types of blogs: there are personal, business, schools, non-profits, politics, military, private, sports, how-to, reviews, and tips blogs. There are many websites to access to set up a personalized blogger. After you choose a name and title for your blog you can customize it to change the fonts and colors to better suit your blog. Blogging started in 1999 when a few people put online live journals and open diaries. Once people caught onto that blogging really took off. Some of the more popular blogs include Business Insider, TMZ, Perez Hilton, and The Huffington Post. To create my blogger I chose the Google Blogger. It was fairly simple setting it up, but customizing it seemed a little trickier. First I went into Google, then clicked the more tab at the top of the screen. Once I got inside that tab I clicked Blogger. Inside the blogger tab it gave me the option to create a new blog. I named my new blog Jennifer Kennard with the address http://jenniferkennard.blogspot.com/. After hitting the create button I went into Customize to change the background color and font. I went to the advanced tab and chose the Luckiest Guy font with the abstract background image that looks like rainbow tiles. For the blog heading I chose the Geo font in size 80pt. I already had a Gmail account through Google so the About Me page seemed pretty easy. If you click the View my complete profile on the left hand side it connects you to my Gmail account. Once inside there you’ll see the About tab. Click the tab and you’ll see my work information, my education, and a little bit more about me. I added two more pages to the blog; one named My Favorite Websites, and the other My Experience. In my favorite websites page I added eight different websites: Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, DMACC, Google, KCCI, AccuWeather, and The Des Moines Register. These websites I access every day, and seem to get great use out of them. In the third tab named My Experience I put this writing in there that tells you how I done it step-by-step. The blog took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I played with it I started fixing things and moving things around. After I published my blog I decided to create a couple new posts. The first couple posts I created were just me writing a few things that were on my mind. Then I decided to post a few pictures. The first picture was my boyfriend and I at the Stratosphere Hotel, Casino, and Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada over spring break. The second picture was taken over five years ago when my two kids were almost babies still. Their names are Mykenzey and Christian. So now that I’ve completed my blog I feel relieved, and am glad that I now know how to do it. Since then I’ve showed a friend of mine how to set up a cool blog for her business. She said it would be a great way to post pictures of her product and any new items she has made. She makes hand-made jewelry and accessories so a blog showing off her daily product would be a great way to promote all her goods. Creating blogs that are creative and interesting so people want to keep coming back are easy to do. Some things to keep in mind is to keep your blog less conversational and more informal, more like your chatting with your friends. Another way is to use your sense of humor, write to keep your audience entertained. You also want to be nice, don’t post things that may offend people. Most importantly be yourself. Some of the latest blogs that I’ve seen are certain reviews on home entertainment, books, places to visit, also types of products to use. Blogs can be very helpful when wanting to hear someone else’s’ opinion, but sometimes blogs can get in the way when trying to conduct research. If you want information that’s 100% reliable and true a blog wouldn’t be the place to find your information. Another downfall in blogging is some people do it to get noticed. They want to become popular with their blogging so they have to compete with others just to get their blog read. Being creative is important when blogging. Blogging can also be a commitment. It’s not much of a blog if you only post one or two posts, then quit. Blogging can be very time consuming, so be sure you like to blog before you commit yourself in doing it. In blogging people are allowed to leave comments, and sometimes those comments might not be very nice. That could be another down fall in blogging. Building my blog turned out to be a good experience for me. It taught me something new that I ended up liking. Some things I would like to improve on my blog would be the pages. I would like all the information on one page so It’s easier to view, and have all my posts on a page by them self. Overall, this assignment was very beneficial and helpful. It’s allowed me to express my thoughts more freely being able to keep an open mind. Now that I’m more familiar with blogging I’ll have a better way to network myself.