Fin.

In creating a professional website, self-promotion becomes much easier. Instead of carrying around a physical portfolio, or sending files via email, a portfolio, biography, and contact information are able to present themselves under the umbrella of one URL. This URL is easy to be written down and handed out on a personal level. The website is also able to be linked to on social media, as well as searchable on the World Wide Web at large.

A clean, professional website presents a positive image to prospective customers. In this style of website, the portfolio work is able to speak for itself without having any distractions from the site around it. The site itself is no nonsense, clean, and concise, which is viewed as competent and efficient. Without directly saying so, the website is able to put forth these qualities in self-promotion.

By also having social media remain true to the brand, linking to the website on these places can only enhance the image. Self-promoting on social media creates opportunity for further user interaction.

The social media projects tie in to the website because they come together to create a cohesive personal brand. Twitter offers quick insight into the user in the form of micro blogging and allows for interaction with other users. Blogger offers long form reads into the mind of the user. LinkedIn provides professional connections and insight. The Website provides background information and a comprehensive guide to the user’s work and brand at a glance.

Tying in social media to the website is necessary to create a network that connects as many aspects as possible to the user’s brand. By linking everything together, the website becomes a part of a larger, more far-reaching online presence. If one aspect of social media is stumbled upon, everything connecting provides access to the full brand. Instead of just accessing 140 character tweets, or just accessing long blog posts, the tweets and posts can be accessed simultaneously. Social media provides the personality of the user’s brand where the clean cut website doesn’t showcase it.

Creating a website presented several challenges, with the biggest one being that HTML code and CSS is an entirely different language. While the Buffalo State Communications program excels in teaching writing in the English language, the website building project offered a first experience in the language of computer science.

Dreamweaver is an Adobe software product, which means that certain shortcuts and the overall logic of the program was not entirely unfamiliar. The software also offered a constantly updated visual to allow the user to “check themselves before they wrecked themselves” in terms of writing code.

HTML code is not entirely unfamiliar to an avid Internet user. The web forums of old and modern day Reddit both use HTML formatting in their regular user posts. To translate that into a full website offered a challenge, but was not entirely scary and unfamiliar. CSS, on the other hand, was totally new to the designer. It was intimidating but heavy guidance allowed for a well-understood introduction.