Technical:

Course
EDTEC 541

Artifact:

Project Description
I took EDTEC 541 during the summer of 2008, and created a website that would show friends of my family members what I have been involved with for the last seven years as an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. When I joined the Coast Guard, I often ran into people that I knew who were surprised to find out some of the things that I had done in my job. My family had run into even more inquisitive people. For example, most of the people that my family members have come into contact knew that the Coast Guard rescues people in trouble at sea, but many were surprised to find out about counter-narcotics missions I had performed off the coast of Central and South America, or that I conducted boardings of merchant vessels off the coast of Iraq during the Gulf War. In short, I have found that many people really do not have a complete understanding of what the Coast Guard does each and every day.

EDTEC Standard
For this artifact, I used the technical Adobe software products Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash to create the website. In constructing the site, I utilized Flash to make my homepage banner’s words grow in size, and also to compress a short video of me at work. I then used Photoshop to resize pictures to make them more “web friendly”, and also made a small picture gallery to show my skills with Photoshop.
To get ideas for how to design my site, I used recommendations from Williams and Tollett’s “The Non-Designers Handbook”, and also from the Homer tutorial provided for the class. Overall, this artifact demonstrates my newly developed technical skills in website development.

Problems or Opportunities
The major problem I faced in this class was my total inexperience with web design software. Dreamweaver is an intricate program, and some of the things that I wanted to do with my website were quite difficult to accomplish at first, but through persistence, I was able to work the kinks out of my site and produce a quality product.
This course was also an opportunity to understand the art of developing a good website, and find out what things work and what really does not when designing a site.

My Capabilities
Thankfully, I have a high tolerance before I let frustration get the better of me. My site experienced many problems, such as not getting the drop down menu to work properly, pictures would not upload to the web, etc. I used these problems as an opportunity to really learn how to use the software, and even how to write the code necessary to get the site to work. I greatly improved my skill with computers by taking this course, and had a lot of fun in the process.

Lessons Learned
I really learned a lot about the Web, and how important it is to really think through when designing a website. I also learned a lot about how video and animation can be used to grab the audience’s attention in a positive way. I now see the web as an important medium to share information with a virtually unlimited audience, and have learned the skills necessary to make my own sites.

Reference
Williams, R. & Tollett, J. (2006) The non-designer’s handbook, 3rd ed. Berkley, CA: Peachpit Press.