Design and Development

This site serves as my final portfolio for the M.Ed. program in Learning Design and Technology at USC. The main navigation menu is located at the top, with submenu options that appear underneath the Portfolio button. The artifacts are all listed in the submenu, but also appear on the “Artifacts” page in their AECT Standards matrix. Overall, the site was intended to be as clear and streamlined as possible.

 

To create this site, I used a site map and style guide (pictured above) as guidance. The tagline for this site is “making elearning second nature,” so I wanted to evoke nature themes in the site’s design while straying away from an overly green color scheme. I wanted to avoid a green color scheme to make the theme stand out, as well as keep to the nature theme while being comforting and warm at the same time.

 

I decided on a comforting, nature-based, and simple theme in order to put potential clients at ease when navigating the site. Three of the five main site colors are neutral; there is a cream, a black, and a light blue. The other two are a bold burnt orange and a deep red. The bolder colors are typically paired with a neutral background in order to maximize their contrast and readability. The link color (#95B6F0) is a darker shade of the pale blue site color, in order for it to be readable on both light and dark backgrounds across the site. I matched the fonts Inter and Lora for headings and body text respectively, using a sans-serif & serif pairing that are available as web-based fonts and contrast with each other without becoming distracting.

 

I did not use a template for this site, and instead opted to build it from scratch using the website builder function in cPanel, which was built into the domain and hosting I purchased from Namecheap. I had never used the cPanel website builder before and wanted to experiment with its ingrained functionality compared to other web authoring tools such as Mobirise or Wordpress. I used the native tools in the cPanel website builder to edit colors and fonts across the site. 

 

I created all graphics in Canva, a popular tool for visual design and editing. Canva allowed me to import my site colors and fonts so they were easily applicable to all designs that I tried. I tested the site during its construction by periodically viewing it through the “Preview” setting on the cPanel platform, before allowing several of my classmates to review it through Blackboard. I wanted my peers to provide their perceptions and any issues they found with the site, and their reviews were very helpful. I asked a peer for several rounds of review on the site logo before arriving at the final design.