Gbridge1987’s Weblog

     For this project so far, there have been a few different strategies that I have used to get to where I am now. The first thing that I have done is read/skimmed the articles that we have been assigned to read and underlined information and important points that I think will be beneficial to me as I work further on this project. The readings can sometimes be very helpful guidelines and often give specifics as to what I should be looking for and how I can make a more effective website.  Another strategy that I have used is brainstorming, i’ll allot a certain amount of time for myself to just write down any thoughts that I have about the project and just keep writing for that amount of time, then I will go back and reflect on what I have written to see how I can make sense of it and how I can categorize the information so that it will be helpful to me. A third strategy that I have used is research. I have been going to other colleges websites and looking how they present their campus organizations as well as looking as similarities and differences and then comparing and contrasting to the information I already have to work with. I am also doing more research on finding demographic information about this campus, so that I can get a better general idea of whom I will be appealing to as my primary target audience.

     With the information I have gathered so far, I have found that the website is used more as a tool to recruit people to the IPCO organization by telling what it has to offer and giving general information about the group as it is in the present as well as providing information of the work it has done in the past. This changes the way that I will be presenting the information of the website as well as the approach I will take in making my page design.

One of my next steps for this project will include more research. I think now that I have completed the audience analysis, I really need to focus on how that information will be presented on my website. Also, I planned to gain more information from the officers of IPCO to just get a feel for what they feel is needed to help let more people know about the IPCO organization on campus. I plan this to be the interview portion of my project. I think that I will continue to do some brainstorming and continue to refer back to the readings as necessary to help keep me going in the right direction.

     After completing my Webtext Review last week, this week has been more focused on researching and developing the design of my website, as well as going in depth to identify my audience. I found the article we read “A World of People and Puposes,” to be very helpful when trying to understand the specific focuses of what my audience should be. I think that this article will also be very helpful to me as I develop my Audience Analysis assignment. I think that so far in my efforts to complete this assignment, it has been easy enought to come up with a simple answer to each of questions asked, but it gets harder to go more in depth with my responses as I am still gathering how to interpret the information that I am getting from what IPCO has presented as their website, and the website that I feel will be more beneficial for the audience that I think they are trying to reach.

     This weekend I am traveling down with some students from IPCO to Athens, Ohio to run a 5k in support of the empowerment campaign which helps in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. On this trip I plan to gather a lot more information about the viewpoints officers in the IPCO organization by asking them their thoughts on the website/audience now and what improvements they think could be made. I also plan on gathering some statistics of the college that will be beneficial to me in figuring out the proportions of whom my target audience will be.

This week class consisted of heavily concentrating on our webtext review papers. Asking questions and doing research was a big part of what we did in class. In class I spent my time trying to to gather and organize my information, making an outline, so that it would be easier for me to write my review for the rough draft. I found that once I re-read about the criteria that I chose to use and then relating it to my subject and deciding how my audience would react to it, all my thoughts and ideas started to flow more swiftly. I found very east to put myself in the position of my potential audience and try to view things from what the audience would expect to get out of their experience using the website.