Throughout my months in Publication 101, I learned so many new tips and tricks, and as a result my website got better while I gained more knowledge. So many components go into creating a website, and I had no clue what it was like maintaining an up to date website. I do have a fair amount of publishing background as I’ve created two yearbooks in highschool, but this was a lot different as it was all online. I can admit I am not the strongest writer, so when I first found out how much I would have to write each week it was a bit daunting and I wondered how I would fair. However, I found out that when writing about something you are really passionate about, such as college football, it makes it really easy to write and more fun.
When first got my website and I was deciding on what wordpress theme to choose for my blog, it was super difficult to decide which one to choose. There were literally thousands to choose from and it took a long time to find the right one. In the end I decided to go with one of the most basic themes called Aakriti Personal Blog, since I wanted my blog to focus mainly on the content and not have the theme distract the reader from my writing. I eventually introduced some color into my website after getting the suggestion from Jennifer’s peer review of my website. I then turned my website a neon yellow color. I choose a very unique color because I wanted to make my website stand out as I’ve never seen any website use yellow as their background and it helps set my website apart from all others and makes it distinct. One thing I did learn about the process while creating a website is that you must have a really good theme that allows you to manipulate it. The biggest regret of my website was actually the choice of theme. If I were to start over and make a new website, I would not use this theme again. I was very constricted on what changes I could make and I didn’t like how the sidebar was tucked away behind a three bar line on the top right which you had to click to get to the CFB standings and the archives. I wanted the standings to be on the homepage going down right hand side, but was not able to do that as I didn’t choose the right theme to get that. Overall, the theme I choose wasn’t right for me, but for the time it did its job and made my website very clean.
For the actual content I was producing, I looked to get inspiration from the leading producers in college football news. ESPN, Bleacher Report and theScore are just 3 of the biggest companies that write about college football. I used the general layout from Bleacher Reports articles on mine as I thought it might give my website more credibility if it resembles a well known sports writing website. These big companies didn’t get this big on luck so they must be doing something right so I decided to take a page out of their books. I also took suggestions from peer reviews to help improve my website. I implemented many great suggestions from Tessa’s peer review of my website. I switched the name of the author writing the posts from “admin”, to my name to make it more personal. I started using hyperlinks to make my posts look more professional Furthermore, I spread out the writing in to multiple paragraphs instead of just one long paragraph to make it easier to read. Getting suggestions for my website through peer reviews helped improve my website and every suggestion I really thankful for. Going forward, if I was to continue my blog I would want to figure out how to put videos directly in my posts so readers won’t have to click away in order to watch the video I am referencing. In the end, very happy about how my posts turned out and the way they looked in the end.
When I had to consider my audience for what I was writing about I had to do some research on who I was writing for. What I learned was that I was writing for all demographics. College football reaches over such a wide spectrum of people and after reading an article by nielsen.com on the reach of college football, I finally realized how big college football actually is. I learned that over 155 million Americans watch college football and it is split 50-50 by gender which makes college football a massive market. Also all ethnicities are shown to watch college football which really shows it covers everywhere in America. With this new knowledge, I had to make sure that what I was writing was very neutral and it wasn’t to difficult or to easy to read so it could appeal to everyone. Also if anyone has read many of my articles you might notice it follows the basic pattern of talking about the best teams in the nation. This is done with a purpose because typically the best teams are the most popular and have the biggest fan bases. For example, I would rather write about Ohio State, who has the #1 fan base of 3,167,263 than Maryland whos fan base is 474,059, according to a report done from the New York Times on where the fans lie. I want to attract as many people to my blog as I can and talking about the big teams was a tactic I used in order to get people here. This didn’t really work as my website had minimal viewership and almost no one went on my website. Hopefully, if I were to continue writing on my blog viewership would go up as that is one of my major goals of this website.
Having a blog and talking about something I’m passionate about each week has been an amazing experience and it was super fun. Going forward I will probably not keep posting on my blog as the college football season ends in just over a month and once its over there is almost nothing to talk about. I had a really fun time writing about topics I’m interested in and I might want to do something like this again next season. Likely I will not use a blog next season but rather I will create an Instagram account to post on, which will be a lot easier for me. What I learned most from this course is that I really enjoy creating content and whether it is on Instagram or a website I will try to always keep publishing something.
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