Joseph Meyer’s design camp was an introduction to WordPress. I learned the basics of creating my own website, including creating pages and posts, choosing themes, and tagging and organizing. I also learned how to locally host a website in order to play around with and make changes to it without those changes being published online immediately.
I can see myself using what I learned at the design camp in a lot of ways. For one, I believe that we are expected to create WordPress blogs as part of our capstone projects next year. Additionally, I may look into making a personal website with a resume and portfolio to be able to show to employers someday. In the short run, I’ve started putting together a fashion blog on the site I created during the design camp. I’m interested in collecting information on fashion trends that are linked to empowerment and presenting them there. I could see there being gallery pages that are just photographs as well as more text-heavy pages that go into greater depth about what makes different styles empowering. Ideally, I would like to create a site that anyone could post to so that different people’s interpretations of feminism and fashion could be collected together on one big mood board or photo blog.
Learning how to create a personal website reminds me of our class discussions on Twine from earlier this semester. Laura Hudson discussed how Twine opens up video game production to a larger group of people in “Twine, the Video Game Technology for All,” reflecting on how Twine’s easy to use software allows more voices and perspectives to be shared through games. In the same way that Twine expands the perspectives shared through video games, WordPress could change who controls content on the Internet by making creating a website more accessible. Although in my experience WordPress was a little harder to use than Twine, given time I think people can create really professional-looking websites, an option that we don’t always have on other blogging sites like Tumblr.