My Project Take-Away

This project has been a completely new experience for me. I’ve made blogs before in my past classes, but that’s where any familiarity ends. Even then, those blogs were not nearly as intricate and put together as this one. This project has exposed me to many useful tools that I can and will use in the future to help promote myself and my work.

This website is the only one I’ve ever made that didn’t only have one page. I’ve never done an “about me” section and I definitely never had a podcast page either. I really enjoyed being able to get creative with the design of this website and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t proud of the way it turned out. At some point in my life I imagine I will have to make another website, whether for work or for a future class. This experience definitely gave me a better idea of what a real website should look like and the amount of time and effort it takes to put together a website that is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

In my opinion, the most useful lesson we learned from this project is how to effectively use social media for promotions. My social media presence isn’t very extensive. I post on my personal Instagram about once or twice a year and that’s pretty much the only social media I use. I liked being forced to get twitter, because that’s not an app I would have willingly started using. I now see how easily it allows information to be dispersed and how effective of a tool it can be, especially for journalists. It’s easy enough to type out a post and I really like how it doesn’t need a picture to go along with it like Instagram does. In the future I think using twitter for my work will be very important for being able to reach the most people, and this experience gave me some familiarity with it.

This project exposed us to a lot of new things that many teachers don’t touch on like website creation and social media presence, but creating a podcast was the most new and exciting one. Podcasts are a great way to expand your audience to those who don’t have the time to sit down and read a blog. When I made my first podcast I underestimated just how difficult it would be to talk for ten minutes. Despite turning in a seven minute podcast, it took me an hour to record. This experience, while unpleasant, was a great learning tool for me to see how much work it takes to put a good podcast together. For my second one I was much better prepared and was much happier with the outcome of it.

I’m very grateful for this experience and everything I was able to learn from it. Especially since I was able to choose what I was writing and talking about I had much more motivation and excitement to actually do it. Being able to focus on Astrology and learn more about it for myself and others was something I really enjoyed doing and haven’t been given the chance to do in the past. In the future I would definitely use the tools I learned in this project to share information with others.