Developing the Web Folio for the English 301 Technical Writing course in the summer of 2018 supported the development of my technical writing skills. Being new to this style of writing brought many technical challenges my way. At times I wanted to reach out to someone for help but was not even sure what I needed to ask in order to receive the appropriate support. So I persevered by trial and error and eventually things started coming together!
The most important goal in developing this Web Folio is to provide visitors with a positive experience including the ease of navigation around the website. For this reason the home page provides a list of the pages with a brief description and includes a link to each of the pages. This allows visitors to quickly identify what they are looking for and where to gain access. To personalize the website, photos illustrating the profession of dental hygiene are displayed throughout. Since the official colour of dental hygiene is purple, making the choice to use this for the page colour is befitting a Web Folio of a dental hygienist.
Experimenting with the various themes eventually brought me back to the Coraline Theme by Word Press. It has such a clean, crisp professional appearance suitable to my person. Uploading media, learning how to edit images, moving images within the pages, and general organization of the pages and posts in this assignment was the most challenging. Much time was spent in deliberating over what images to use, why to include one image over another, where to place them, how to make the words flow smoothly, how are the words and images being interpreted by my audience and so on. The list could go on and on! As a result, several hours went into the editing process.
The Best Work page features some of my best writing in this course including the definition assignment that was written for a non-dental audience, a peer review of a classmate’s work, a complaint letter and finally a bad news letter. Please be sure to visit this page and read them.
Although intense at times, this technical writing course was a positive experience. Completing this project is a great personal achievement considering the lack of technical writing experience and knowledge that was had at the beginning of this course. It is amazing to see the positive improvements to my writing abilities while enjoying my new found passion of creating this online space. Thanks to great instruction, support and diversity of the material I now have a variety of new skills that will be incorporated into my academic and professional life.