My Social Studies Website

Here is the link to the Social Studies website I created with Weebly: http://allisonsocialstudies.weebly.com/

Reflection:

1. What is your reaction to the entire web development process? Please describe any positive and negative reactions.

Overall, I enjoyed making this website. I thought that Weebly had a lot of fun and useful features--it almost had too many features, and I started becoming a bit obsessive with making the "perfect" website! I wish that their forum was a bit more extensive, but given that it is a free site, I understand why it is more limited. The format was accessible and easy to use, and they had a good variety of backgrounds and designs to use, so I feel like I was able to create my own unique site.

2. What was involved in the process of developing your site? What obstacles did you encounter? How did you overcome those obstacles? What successes did you encounter?

At first I was confused with building the pages, and my homepage kept disappearing, which was frustrating. But I was able to figure out what I was doing wrong and I encountered no further serious issues. At first I also had some trouble editing my paragraphs on the Links page, but I think Weebly was just acting glitchy because I was using Google Chrome as the browser. When I went back later, it worked fine.

3. Will you continue to build on/update this site after this course ends? Why/Why not? Please explain.

I will definitely continue to build on this site after the course ends, which is why I modeled it as if it were my actual teacher/student teacher page. I am still deciding whether I like the website or wiki format best. I think I might use both for different purposes. I like the forum option on the website, but I also like how the wiki allows students more involvement in the process because they can edit. I may use this website as a general "social studies" page (with links, my blog, etc.) but then a wiki for more course-specific content.

4. What errors/issues did you find when you tested your web site for 508 compliance? Based on those errors/issues, what changes would you make to your site?

I found many errors when I tested for 508 compliance, although my website was OK for Interactive behavior. The main issue was accessibility. One of the specific 508 errors was: "The use of color must not be single method for indicating important information on a web page." Another was: "Documents must be organized so they are readable without requiring user agent support for style sheets." If I wanted to fix these problems, I would have to make sure that any information with color is also available without color. I would also have to organize documents so that they can be read without style sheets.