The end of the semester for our GHS 208 course meant the final project of creating a website, something that I’m sure the majority of the class (besides Gerry) had not had much experience with. Being an engineering student prior to switching to business, I dealt with a lot of different forms of coding, computer aided design (CAD), manufacturing systems, and many others that all required computer work and computer skills. But, I had never built my own website prior to this project.
My group decided to do our project on the subject of health and wellness in China since all of us had an interest in a different subcategory of health and wellness. We ended up collecting information on healthy foods and diets, mental health, China’s healthcare systems, and Tai Chi. Gathering the information for this project proved to be the easier portion for our group however. Building the physical website was a bit tedious. Two of our groupmates had used Wix, an online website builder that we saw a lot of our other classmates use, prior to this project so it seemed like an easy route to take. Wix was relatively straight forward in how to use it, but was very complex when it came to the simple things. For example, unlike a Google doc, only one person (one account) could work on the website at a time. So, we all signed in using the same account to modify our website, and this ultimately caused some information to be lost or be not saved properly and just gave us all a headache. Personally, when I was writing paragraphs on the information I gathered, I had an issue where after I would click off of a textbox, I would not be able to click back into it to modify any of the text I had already entered. I learned this the hard way the very first time and eventually had to delete the whole text box and begin again. Over the remainder of the project, I constantly had to click back to the website when I was searching for info or pictures to make sure my textbox was still highlighted so I could continue to type which just became really annoying. Also, it was difficult to just copy and paste pictures. I finally found how to insert them through the Wix menu, and then struggled with proper sizing of the image as another group mentioned in their presentation.
The biggest headache came the morning of our presentation. We all logged in Thursday morning before our presentation and found 2 of our 4 pages missing for whatever reason. We all had a brief panic attack, but then somehow came across a feature (I believe under the “saved” tab) that allowed us to restore our website from the last time it was saved. This luckily brought our website back to what we wanted it to be, but not before a nice Thursday morning freak out.
For the purpose of our project, Wix did the job it needed to do for us. But I definitely think in the future if I needed to create a bigger website or a website for a company, I would pay some money to really get a professional website builder or just hire someone to do it for me. It was quite a mess, even for the relatively short length of this project. I did enjoy the process of website building besides all the weird quirks of Wix though. If I have to build another website in school, I feel like I will be able to create a similar website in a shorter amount of time. Our overall presentation went well and I thought our group, as well as the others that presented, really got a good grasp on website building.