Individual Website

  For me the individual website has been a challenge and before last night I was really struggling with it. I still am, but not to the point of feeling hopeless and lost. Dreamweaver is a challenging piece of software, but I feel like once I can figure out how to do certain simple things I can progress to more difficult aspects. I just have to remember to put everything into layers, instead of just inserting tables, etc. 

  My biggest problem is deciding what my color scheme should be. I like the traditional black, grey and white, but as I found out last night using these colors alone creates a mundane website. A "mundane" website might be okay if that's its purpose or it matches the personality of the website creator. I don't know, but I would like to think strictly black, grey and white does not meet my personality, although I could be wrong. 

  So last night I decided I would experiment with color and the results were AWESOME. I found this pastel like pink color. Even though the color itself was awesome and appeared as if it would work well on my page, I was not ready to throw all caution to the wind. I used this color for my navigation bar. The pink contrasted very well with the grey and gives my website the necessary "pop" that it needed. 

  Even though I had a major success on the color front, not everything with my website went perfectly. I did make a lot of progress, but I feel I should have done more. My technological biography is still causing me major headaches. I finally narrowed it down to the last two or three pages. The information on these pages is the most worthwhile to me and my website. This solves the first problem, but creates a second. How do I put this on my website? Does anybody have any ideas on how I can do this? Any ideas or comments would be amazing. Thanks. 

"Visual Social Semiotics:Understanding How Images Make Meaning"

In her Article, "Visual Social Semiotics: Understanding How Images Make Meaning" Claire Harrison explains how photographs can produce meaning. I have to agree with her one hundred percent. Although, I thought her explanation and reasoning was at times dry and difficult to follow, but her writing style and  rhetoric does not take away from the importance of this idea. Every day we see how meaning and semiotics are perceived through photographs and other non-textual elements.

Billboards, magazine covers and politicians all use this method to grab our attention, make a point, and sometimes a profit. For example, I was watching T.V. the other day and noticed a disturbing political smear ad. I despise these aids and believe they do not serve any purpose or add anything to the individuals campaign. Instead, these ads only amplify the immaturity of the candidate running the aids. What made the aid so disgusting was it used the candidate's own daughter to slam this opponent. The first visual element of the commercial is a picture of a baby lying in a crib. At this moment, we are emotionally involved because our attention goes directly to the child in the crib. From here we are forced to watch and see how the baby is related to the commercial. During the first five to ten seconds of the ad, we are unaware the child's presence in this ad is technically unrelated to politics. Still this method is effective. Even though I had no intention of voting for this candidate before this ad it did make an emotional impact. Several days later I still remember the ad.

This ad reminds me of the Time magazine cover that we looked at in class. Personally, I think Time magazine should have chosen a photo which was more visually representative of the war in Afghanistan. I thought the photo they chose implied the cover story was going to be exclusively about the young girl, not our role in the war. I can understand wanting to make an emotional impact on the viewers and readers, but I also believe there needs to be an element of truthfulness to the photo. I mean I think the photo should remain true to the story or the message. Companies, politicians and news outlets should not choose photos based on how they make someone feel. Instead, they need to make this decision based on their audience, the story and the message they want to convey.