I have never thought about creating my own blog and publishing things until I decided to join PUB101 and to be honest, it was a great learning experience. The reason I guess I have never tried or thought about doing it because I was not confident or educated on how to start my own site. But this course really pushed me to try new things and to experiment. Throughout my experience I have had many highs and lows with my blog. At the very start, I had many lows, trying to choose a theme, knowing the basics on how to publish a post, and trying to make things work when they were not. Deciding how I wanted to make my blog look and what content I want on it took a lot of time and effort. To this day, I still want to change a lot of things on my blog because I always feel like there is something to make better.

Publishing for my blog category was easier than the posiel category because I had many art pieces waiting to be posted. The academic part took on a lot more work. Due to the past Instagram posts I have made on artbynishita, it made it more convenient to post on my blog because I have experience blogging about my artwork. After publishing a few posts on my blog, I started to realize that it is becoming an art blog because I mainly focused on publishing my art pieces and discussing what some of them meant.

The peer reviews was really great because getting feedback from others is always helpful towards making room for improvement. When I would read the reviews, I took the feedback and created some changes on my site. After creating those changes, I saw how my blog started to look and become more aesthetically pleasing. One of my peer reviews also mentioned how I should post some of my poetry on my blog to have a wide range of people come visit my blog. Having different content may attract different groups of people, and so I added a poem. I also added some changes to my sidebar because it had a lot of empty space before.

I created my blog in a way to engage people with similar interests as me. Interests mainly include, art, poetry, and hip hop. My blog was meant for youth, young adults, and elders who are interested in visual art, hip hop and poetry. Although, it is targeted towards that audience, I like to encourage others to check out my blog because you never know if you will be interested or not until you see it yourself. When I see my google analytics, it shows that people have seen my site from eight different countries; Canada, United States, Jamaica, China, Austria, United Kingdom, Japan, and Philippines. Google Analytics is very useful and helpful because it gives you descriptive data on what activity is going on your website. To know specifically who my targeted audience is, I check on google analytics. I have attached screenshots of the graphs below from google analytics to show my overall results.

I have created my blog in a way for my viewer to get a some sort of understanding of my personality, for example, for the header image, I decided to use a picture of me standing by this huge brick wall of graffiti. This gives a sense of who I am to my viewers. When I had gotten peer reviews, they also mention how the layout, and image I use for my header gives an understanding of who and what the blog is about. I tried my best to publish my online self similar to how I am in person so my personalities match in both worlds. I have done that in my blog category because the stuff I publish is personalized and the language is casual. I show my passion of art and hip hop through my posts, for example, some of my works is built around hip hop artist portraits. My main focus on my blog category was my artwork and I feel that if my viewers enjoy what they see, they will come back to my site or scroll through my Instagram link that is attached and maybe follow me.

I do plan on keeping my website but changing few things. I want to design my website in a way that just focuses on my artwork. I want to create more awareness with my work as I already started on Instagram. I am going to change my URL to artbynishita.com because that is the name I go by on my Instagram. I want to keep things unified. My goal is to have people more aware of “artbynishita” and have more viewers on my site. I want to change it up a bit to mainly focus on my art and to have it similar to my art page on Instagram. Hopefully, I will get more well known through my website.

After reading Makshada’s review for my blog, I got a better sense of what I need to improve on my site. She mentioned how she viewed my Instagram page that I included on my blog and enjoyed the content I had on my Instagram. Makshada mentioned how I should also add some of my poetry on my blog because it could attract different groups of people. I agree with her and will consider adding some of my poetry on my blog.

Adding poetry on my blog could attract more people on my blog. I do want higher traffic on my site to feel more accomplished. I can then view my analytics and compare how many viewers I gained or lost. I want my audience to stay on my page longer, keeping their attention, and having them come back more than once. In order to do that, I will need to add more content of my poetry for people to relate to. If my audience can relate to my poetry, they would probably come back to my site to see what I post in the future.

Thanks to Makshada for her feedback, I have new perspectives on what I should add on my page.

What happens when you think of remix? Probably a musical track, right? Well guess what?! It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. You all probably know by now that visual art is my thing. So, I decided to create a remix in the art form… How did I decide to do this? Well, I got permission to take a picture of my classmates charcoal abstract sketch. Then, I created a remixed version of it by adding colours and soft edges. I basically took things out, added new details and changed it up a bit, but still recreating some aspect of the sketch. Take a look at how it turned out: