What I found extremely interesting during this week’s discussions was how much thought needs to go into creating a visually appealing and functional blog, or any website for that matter. When visiting a website for daily use, we rarely notice anything about it unless something is not working correctly. For example, when we first reach the homepage and are easily able to transition between various topics on the site, it is nothing out of the ordinary. On the other hand, if we reach a website and struggle to find the links to reach different pages or see minor mistakes in functionality, we are quick to judge. As we have been creating our Halal Carts website and collaborating with one another, it has become more and more clear to me that such a project is no easy task. In order to have the format of the blog look as we wanted it to, we needed to communicate with all of the members of the class and come to a consensus. After we figured out the theme, our ideas needed to be compiled into the website and we’ve been lucky enough to have had Jake do much of the heavy lifting in this area. Even today, when we are less than a week away from announcing our website as complete, we realized there are issues that need to be resolved such as the arrows at the bottom of posts which lead to different categories.

I think this type of a project really forces us to think about all of the work that goes into the websites we use every day, and how many people are involved in making them look as they do. Websites are clearly not created overnight and take the hard work of people skilled in technology, something that many of us have had no experience with until now. Regardless of the difficulty of such a task, I’ve found it extremely exciting to see our ideas and edits come to life on the blog. Even though Jake has been largely responsible for making this happen, we’ve had the opportunity to see the backend of the website and learn about the different widgets needed to make it something unique. It has definitely made me even more appreciative of websites that are aesthetically pleasing and functional, but also more sympathetic to those which are lacking in such areas. Web design is a process of trial and error, as we have experienced with our own site.