Where I Am With Coding/My Website: Stuck.

Lately I’ve felt a bit stuck on the whole coding/web design thing. I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to get the boxes/content to work well together. I have everything with that “working” now, but I can’t truly say I’m happy with how it looks. I feel like everything is really cluttered and squished together. Responsive? perhaps. Emotional web design? No, not really. I don’t think it’s doing much justice for my work at all or showing much of who I am as a writer.

My problem seems to be that I don’t really know what to do or how to do it at this point. I just kind of feel stuck in the stage. In time I suppose for project 3 I’d like to add a carousel of my articles. Something similar to how the Rowan website alternates between different articles relating to the University, but I feel like I don’t know where to go prior to that stage.

I’m starting to consider removing the Twitter and GoodReads article so I have more room on the grid for a third article or to increase the width of the articles. That might work better. I think it’s more important to have the articles stand out and look better than the widgets anyway. Instead of using the widgets I could always link my social media pages to a different page on the website.

I have been trying to look at different websites for blogs that I have worked with in the past or that I feel resemble what I might like to do with my website such as BitRebels.com, AroundPhilly.com, and CloudItGuru.com for inspiration. I’ve always been a big fan of the design featured throughout BitRebels.com, but I know that it is really complicated. When I view the css/html involved it makes my head spin with all of the various codes. I am afraid that it is well beyond my skill level at the moment.

I am looking forward to my next conference with Dr. Wolff on Thursday afternoon to hopefully gain some new ideas and insights so that I know what to do and where to go with my website. I know that although I feel stuck now, this feeling will soon past as I gain inspiration and skills needed to take my website to the next step of web design and make it more professional and reflective of my skills and who I am as a writer.