Website Building

In a previous post, I explained my plan to build resources for students studying the blues. I decided this in part because this topic is extremely common in Year 7-8 music, and yet in my experience, it is very poorly taught. (Here comes the uni student with a saviour complex.) More on that later. (Edit: You can check out more of my reasoning for creating blues resources here.)

Now at the time of my last post, I had a few different thoughts about how I could create resources. One option I thought about was creating iBooks, like I did during Popular Music Studies last semester. As a class we learned how to use iBooks author to create interactive resources for students studying popular music, and the applications are quite broad for iBooks. I really like that you can imbed images, audio and movies, and also that you can have scrolling images and clickable images as well (e.g. an image of a score that you then click on and it plays the music).

The only problem with iBooks is a lack of universal applicability. Over August and September of this year, I undertook my first high school prac at a comprehensive high school that had 5 music teachers, 2 concert bands, 2 choirs, an orchestra, wind ensemble and 2 stage bands. Music was thriving in the school, and it was also situated in a very affluent part of Sydney and as a result the school was quite well resourced. But I never saw an iPad during my six weeks of prac. The school is planning on implementing BYOD from 2017, but in all likelihood, students will bring a huge range of devices to school, and many of them will not be compatible with iBooks.

And so I thought to myself, how can I create a wider audience for these resources? The obvious answer was to create something browser-based. I decided I would create a website in wordpress (as honestly, I haven't found my wix experience overly positive).

Making a Website with Wordpress

There are lots of websites, blogs and YouTube videos devoted to teaching you how to make blogs in wordpress.com. I actually ignored them all and just got straight into it. The process was simple at the very start, but then I had to get through the learning curve of design and menu systems to understand how wordpress words.

The first stage was choosing a layout, and wordpress has a lot of different options that all look great. I was after a design that had a menu up the top, because I thought that would create an attractive layout.

I actually went with one layout for a little while, and then decided that I didn't really like it anymore, and thankfully wordpress allows you change your theme at any point. Once I settled on my theme, I set about making the home page look nice. As the resources were all about the blues, I chose some of my favourite musicians who play the blues and make a little collage of their photos (which of course were labelled as free to use and share in Google images #nocopyrightinfringement).

Then it was just a matter of my welcome message, and menu options up the top. Menu choices ended up being a bit tricky, because although it was easy to create the links, when I hadn't actually linked them to anything, they would redirect to funny places, so I had to connect the skeleton of the website to the inside of it. Of course that involved having things on the inside. But that's another post.