Reflection on Website Project & Final Website URL

URL: ceiwertz.pcriot.com (dead link)

Reflecting on the complete experience of creating a professional website, I have to admit it was a lot harder to do than I had initially thought. I explored many options on the tools available to both create and host the website. I started off exploring Dreamweaver, but since I had a program at home called iWeb on my mac computer, I decided to use iWeb for designing the site since I could use it without driving to school or downloading a trial version of the software.

I also explored a lot of different free web servers for hosting the finished product of my website, and after going through quite a few I came across x10hosting.com, which offers free web hosting and a lot of freedom in uploading and maintaining the website. I think they even offer free email accounts attached to your website if you want to sign up for them. Another feature I liked about x10hosting is that they can transfer seamlessly to another domain if you ever buy one, which I also looked into. Luckily, no one owns ceiwertz.com, so I could purchase it for a year for only $10, but I decided for now I’ll stick to the subdomain ceiwertz.pcriot.com, which is free, until the day I might be able to publish the website on … I don’t know … a university’s domain?

After securing a program for designing the site and the host server to publish the site, I think came the hardest part: creating the site from scratch. Outlining which pages to include, especially given that I am the one with least amount of experience teaching in our class, was difficult; however, I have to say the finished product is one I am really proud of and one I feel reflects my talents and goals well. I especially love how the site has become something I think I will continually use as a professional. All my work can be stored on the site as PDF, which is amazing since I usually have multiple areas where I’m storing papers and conference information and the such. And, my links page is a quick way for me to navigate the web how I choose, allowing me to remember to look into certain conferences or follow certain journals like the online edition of Computers and Composition, which cannot be obtained in hard copy.

As the project pertains to our readings this semester in class, I come back again and again to Sullivan’s “Taking Control of the Page: Electronic Writing and Word Publishing.” Sullivan argues that computers have changed what we must be and what we must be able to do as writers, specifically calling word processing as a writer an act of both writing and publishing. Like this article, publishing a website has made me realize that the act seems to not only change what I must do as a writer but also what I must do to be literate in today’s society. If I am to market myself as an academic professional—especially in composition rhetoric—I need to be able to compile my studies, CV, links, and the such in a website. If I do not have these tools in my tool belt, so to speak, I am not nearly as marketable as a professional who can.

I also think about how concerned we have been this semester about the composition classroom and writing as a skill versus an art. Beginning from scratch on this project, because I am by no means a talented website designer, reminds me that to reach the polished, finished project we must have both acquired a skill (which I did to some extend during the course of this project) and utilized our voice in artistically making a product our own creation. The same is true for writing. It is a skill and one that needs to acquire to some extent before making it their own. I suppose the question we have been seeking to answer this semester is what is more important, then, in a freshman writing classroom: acquiring a skill or developing the art. Perhaps that is a question that cannot be answered because every class will have different goals and different students, but I would hope that at the end of any semester we as writing teachers have taught that there is more to composition than technicalities, just as in the project of creating a website I have discovered there is much more to web design than web layout or web hosting.