Throughout the previous modules I kept talking that I will be launching the project website soon. It felt a bit like being a politician making promises during election time but with a lot of things to go around and only 24 hours to do them, I simply had to prioritize here and there. The busy period of the year for me in academic respect didn't help much either.
Being a resourceful Eastern European, I am used to counting on myself to do the tasks at hand and in this case that meant that I will be designing my own website. It wouldn't have been the first time. When I was at high school, I was taught how to write html codes and I was fairly good at that. However, my life took a different turn so I cannot say I am a computer programmer. Besides, creating a website from scratch using html takes a lot of time, much more than I was prepared to invest in the whole endevour.
Hence, I resorted to a tried and tested method. At university, they taught us how to create websites using website builders and I created my first photography website using www.webnode.com back in 2014. It wasn't rocket science and looking at it now I think that it isn't quite good but at the time it was quite the breakthrough since it was the first time I felt like a 'professional photographer'.
Now, once I had to do a website for Culture Crossroads, I decided to create a bit fancier website, something that is much more up to date and modern-looking. So I switched to www.wix.com instead. They have much more variety in terms of available themes and give quite a lot of freedom in terms of design. What is even better for someone on a tight budget as me - they have much more free options than Wordpress, for instance.
So it took me quite a while to think of a way to present my project. The cover page was easy to create since I knew exactly what I wanted to show. The motto of Culture Crossroads The Balkans Zoomed was invented by my mother (who is always fascinated with any kind of photographic work I do and at the moment was watching how a website is created).
Next thing I needed was an 'about page' and explanation about what the project actually is and that was also relatively easy to do since I already had the text written down. Here is a screen grab of the about page:
It took me some time to figure out how to present the six categories and then I came up with six thematic galleries - one for each category. The idea of the galleries was to have the images and some information about the thing in the picture and, ideally, a link to the blog where things would be explained in detail (which is yet to be sorted out since writing takes a lot of time):
I also plan to add a map of the places I visit and a list of the things by country but that is yet to be done since I have to figure out how to do it (which means that I have to do it myself ).
What delayed the project for so long was my desire to launch both my personal website (also created with WIX) and the project website at one and the same time. It turned out that my photographic website had a lot of things to be sorted out before the launch so that I wanted to do things right. My personal website was also created alongside that of the project and it was a much more complicated deed in terms of design, content upload, texts, hyperlinks etc.
Unfortunately, for the time being, I cannot afford to pay monthly subscription fees so I will be sticking to the free versions for some time (just in case I have some other ideas and decide to change something).
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