Whose Design is it Anyway?

In addition to not being a blogger by nature, I'm also not a graphic designer. While I'm creative, spatial relationships are not my strong point. When we want to update something in our house, my husband has to get out the tape measure and painters tape and show me exactly where each piece of furniture will go. When I design displays at work, it takes some serious planning on my part to make the final product look the way it does in my imagination. So when it comes to designing this portfolio, I'm constantly adjusting. I've arranged and rearranged the pages countless time to create a structure that feels logically organized to me. I've altered headings, headers, footers, adjusted menus, played with page widths, obsessed over fonts and color schemes, and added and removed widgets.

All of these adjustments have taught me that while I might not be a natural with design, being tenacious pays off. If I play around with the page enough, eventually I'll wind up with something I can be proud of. Developing this site has also caused me to look at other sites with a more critical eye. What aspects do I find aesthetically pleasing or displeasing? How easy is it to navigate and to find what I need quickly, and what are the features that make that happen? When I find myself giving up on a site mid-stream, what caused it? Is it the information, or is it something about how that information is presented? Learning to look at elements of web design that I haven't paid much attention to before has also led me to rethink how I present information to my students on our library website. I find myself being more cognizant of how much information I put on a page, and of how I categorize information so they can find it later. As I've built this site, I've also been reorganizing our library site, and adding features to make it more user friendly. It's a never-ending process, but it's gratifying when it all comes together.

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