Electronic Communication (English 150)

In choosing an example of electronic communication, I’m focusing on this very website.

Reflecting on Electronic Communication

Over the course of the semester, I’ve had the opportunity to work with the electronic mode of communication in a variety of ways, from email and word-processing, to graphic design and video production, but probably the most important way I improved my electronic communication skills was designing and building this website.

To create this website, I brainstormed pages and planned the site’s structure, then I wrote articles, incorporated visuals and video, created an image gallery, and chose and customized my site theme. To customize the theme, I included a photo of Iowa State, made color and font choices, and added custom content to the sidebars, through the use of widgets.

Being able to create my own website has helped me understand how and why websites look the way they do. Designers’ choices are limited by many factors, which is something I now understand better, and sometimes there is a limited amount of flexibility and sometimes there’s a lot. These kinds of limitations effect how web designers work, and so they affect how websites look and act. Having designed and built a website myself, I’m now in a better position to understand these limitations, and this actually makes me a better Internet browser, as well.