https://woodmancyl.sites.carleton.edu
Building this site through WordPress was a fun experience. Setting up a WordPress install was a reality check. In my other academic work, I’m used to dealing with specific frameworks and predictable outcomes. Building a website, however, is a totally different kind of logic. Navigating the dashboard and figuring out how to make a theme actually look the way I wanted was a lesson in patience. It felt like moving from being a consumer of the web to being a builder, which was a pretty cool shift in perspective. However, building the website layout was frustrating. It felt like there were too many options sometimes, and I felt a little overwhelmed at times. When I finished building the site, it was pretty cool to step back and see the website I helped build.
I see this website being pretty useful for me in the future. My plan is to use this website as a way to store and showcase some academic work that I’m proud of. I imagine I will be throwing my comps project in there whenever that gets finished. I don’t have to use it solely to showcase past work, though; if I ever stumble onto a new idea or new research that I find interesting and also helpful, I can post that on my site as well.
There are definitely a number of both pros and cons when it comes to hosting my own website as opposed to signing up for a service or using social media. The biggest pro, in my opinion, is that the website is mine. I’m not using someone else’s space to voice my thoughts, but it is my own space. One of the trade-offs, however, is that it isn’t exactly the easiest thing to set up. If something goes wrong on my site, I can’t just sit back and wait for someone to fix it, like I would if a social media platform went down. I have to go into the site and fix it myself, which could be a difficult task.