Week 3 (January 19/25, 2014)

Looking at creating websites this week. I first thought Google Sites would be the best, mostly because I already have a Gmail account and wanted to keep from making more and more accounts, but alas, Google Sites isn't as easy to use and I prefer something ease-of-use over keeping things all in one place.

The website to create websites I will be using is Weebly. Just from my brief experience with it so far I find it has a lot more options of themes and it is easier to use to start building a nice looking website with plenty of information.

Okay, now that I have had some time to look around at some other teacher websites and also really play around with my Weebly site I can say that I am pretty comfortable with a lot of the options available to create a pretty solid website. After about four of five attempts I was finally able to decide on a theme I liked, that's oddly enough what took me the most time to be comfortable with. Once I decided on the theme I was able to put together the rest of the sections of the site pretty easily basing them off some ideas from different teacher websites I looked at.

I found adding images to the site was very easy as well as creating multiple pages, including sub-pages for some. Adding text was very easy as well as changing the font and colour. I was able to add a Google Calendar quickly and easily as well as add in a YouTube video in my "Cool Links" page. The links page I decided just to have typed out links instead of inserting something like Symbaloo. I actually like the design and benefit of using Symbaloo for a links page and I may work on that at another time. Time will tell if I see enough education-related Symbaloo pages that will convince me to add one to my page. I decided to keep my Home page very basic and just have welcome message and leave the rest of the information on the appropriate sub-pages.

I did not include a blog, picture gallery, contact form, map, search box, document download or social media links, however, they are all features that I believe could be a very nice addition to the website but only if they will be used and appreciated. I feel I will have a good idea when that might be and the simplicity of just dragging these features into the section of the website that you want them makes me comfortable in the feeling that anytime I might want to add them to the site I could do so with not too much difficulty.