Website Design Process

Biological Evolution Website Design Process

Discussion of Website Development Process

After having made websites over the past 15 years in MySpace, Blogger, Weebly, Moodle, Joomla, the first rendition of Google Sites, and the new Google Sites, I decided to use new Google Sites to make a biological evolution website. I chose this platform because it is easy and familiar to navigate for most web users.

Progression (Steps and Procedures) for Creating Website

1. In Google Drive, I first made a Google Site.
2. The theme I chose from the provided options was “Impact” because the default background image in the upper banner is a pixelated world map, which fits well with the topic of biological evolution, and because the bold and authoritarian fonts and layouts are well-suited to this controversial topic.
3. I then chose to have a standard-sized banner at the top of each page so I could keep the world map visible and add my own image, and I chose to have navigation at the top of the page instead of the left sidebar because websites these days most often use the top banner navigation as opposed to the sidebar.
4. To add my own image to the main page, which is a photo I took at the Elwha River earlier this fall, I clicked on the banner, chose to change the image, and uploaded this photo from my computer.
5. Before adding content to the main page, I created three sub-pages and titled them “Graphics,” “Multimedia,” and “Print.” Upon doing this, I re-named the main page “Home.” The page names and links to the pages appeared automatically in the top navigation bar.
6. I then added a text box to the “Home” page and typed in the text that is visible there now. To the top line of text, I changed the font from “Normal” to “Heading,” and I changed the second line of text from “Normal” to “Subheading.” I did this to make these parts of the page stand out from the rest of the page.
7. To the list of links to the other pages, which doubles up the options available in the top navigation bar but is helpful for many web-users who are not very familiar with websites and/or are accessing the website on a mobile device where the full top navigation bar does not display, I made bullets and inserted hyperlinks to the text to point them to the appropriate sub-pages. To insert the hyperlinks, I highlighted the text I wanted to have linked, clicked the hyperlink button, which looks somewhat like a paperclip, and selected the appropriate subpages.
8. I then added a section below this with some links to external and related websites. To insert the hyperlinks, I highlighted the text I wanted to have linked, clicked the hyperlink button, which looks somewhat like a paperclip, and copy/pasted in the URL’s of the website.
9. To the three subpages, I inserted text boxes and followed steps 6 and 7.
10. I then clicked the “Publish” button in the upper right, chose a URL (surprisingly, “biologicalevolution” was not taken as a Google Site name), and tested the webpage on various browsers.

Technology Used for Creating Website

I used a laptop computer with internet access. The internet browsers I used were Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. I used all of these to test out how the site would look on different browsers and to confirm that the site was open and accessible on the internet.