The Value Behind a Website

John Ovak: Freelance Writer

        A website can be used for many things. For many freelance workers it is used primarily to promote their brand and more importantly promote themselves. The website created for John Ovak's com 336 class in college is a perfect example of a website used for self promotion. The contents of the website being purely related to promoting and informing the public of what he does and what he has worked on in the past as examples of his skills. With a home page that has a introductory biography of himself including a portrait, a portfolio of a wide range of skills in writing, graphic design and video editing, a page with contact information and finally a resume across an entire page. In addition to having a custom banner that is the same across all pages of the website. All of these things give the viewer some perspective on John Ovak so he can better promote himself in the way that he wants to.

        Furthermore, past projects during the semester are not only showcased on the website but they also helped prep the concept of self promotion and writing professionally in the third person. The twitter project was a great way to open students up to the idea of tweeting with a purpose to promote something without inserting themselves into the topic, which laid some serious ground work for this assignment which was actually a way of promoting themselves without inserting themselves. In addition, the necessary aspects of the contact information included the twitter project so that not only was it good practice but the students got to take the twitter they had practiced on and got to link it to their website for a more professional look. A company or a freelance self employed person needs to link their social media and stay professional and active on the account to show future website visitors that they are an active company/person.

        As for the overall experience with designing the website, it was surprisingly painless. With experience in coding from an earlier project, the WikiHow project, students got to see what different coding did what for their step by step wikihow. Now the content and the coding might not be the same whatsoever, however the mere exposure to coding was enough to help students better understand what they were even looking at when it came to looking at the coding box inside the Dreamweaver program. The experience of knowing that every little space and symbol did something to the coding was very crucial when starting out inside Dreamweaver. Another important experience was the realization that the website was all in one folder and that any resources that weren't inside that folder wouldn't be visible because the website didn't know where that image or document was in relation to itself. So to have to build a website and copy and past resources into the website folder was something to think about when doing other things for any class, making sure everything is bundled together and packaged nicely so that not just the original computer can view the file properly.