Entry #2

What a great day!

In today's lesson, we were finally introduced to the blog and website system. I've been looking forward to this for a while because our idea was approved early, which meant that I had more time to think of the visuals, how the page would look, and conceptualise how I wanted the site organisation to be like. Finally, today was the day to put things into action!

At first I was taken aback at how horrendous the default layout was, but then we were told that we could change the design and I was SO RELIEVED. The old Google Sites are a little more outdated and more difficult to use, so I switched to the new Google sites instead. In doing so, I accidentally took the whole site offline because the system automatically migrated the site to another URL.

It took me a while to figure out how to use Google Sites and get the site and URL back to where it belonged. I managed to get the hang of it really quickly, since it's definitely more intuitive and streamlined than the other free sites like Wix and Squarespace (which I normally use because well, we aren't earning money yet). I genuinely cannot be any more grateful about having a corporate account for this module because it is so, so helpful and it really does help. Honestly, I don't think I can go back to using free sites anymore. Oh luxe life, how you tempt me so.

After setting up the rough layout and page organisation of the site, I got down into the nitty gritty. I started assigning header images to each page that we had, and got down to standardising how the blog entry posts would look like. The team blog has its own format, and the individual blog entries and pages have their own format that I will personally oversee and maintain. This is so that our website as a whole is cohesive and doesn't look disjointed, which really helps our image if everyone is able to present a united front in the form of standardised pages. So even though we will all have different content in our individual blogs, people will know that we are all still a part of the same team.

We managed to finalise our logo design today, which I am very happy for because it means that I can continue work on developing our brand image. Right now, I need to work on the colour because I'm leaning towards having a dual-colour logo, but having a single colour logo would be much easier (and budget friendly), especially when it comes to printing collaterals, like T-shirts, name-cards, etc. Just, generally anything involving printing.

I might leave it as a single-colour logo for now because colour coordination will take a while, and I want to focus on getting the content out on the page in time for our presentation on 20th October first before fine-tuning the smaller details. I also made a favicon for the website, which I might have to edit as well because it's not too obvious as of now.

... It's still not super obvious. But, it's definitely much better. I changed the favicon back to the dark green, though, simply because it was weird to use the maroon/fuchsia since our site doesn't have it anywhere.

After class, I had a Student Union workshop to attend and so I was unable to join my group mates to visit the succulents nursery at Choa Chu Kang. I did ask them to buy me a couple of plants so that I could try taking care of them in the weeks leading up to the presentation, so we shall see how that works out.

In the meantime, Cheryl and I will set up the task sheet according to the calendar that the group agreed on before we parted ways. After that, I'll work on the copy and visuals for the rest of the site, including updating our team blog entries.

I shall end my blog post here before it gets too long.

Adios, till the next post!

Cleo