Report

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Explain why you chose the blog topic?
A task where we are required to establish and maintain a shared blog in western mainstream society was a real challenge for a group where the majority of the group members had language difficulties. Nevertheless, we managed to overcome this and after long consideration, eventually agreed to do a blog about food. Eating is a staple part in everyone’s lives. There are no language barriers, cultural barriers as in our global context; people are willing to experience new types of food. This is supported in a number of cook shows and reality TV shows such as Masterchef.

Another reason why food is an excellent topic for a group with our situation is that it allowed for easy communication. Since food appeals to the sense of taste and smell rather than solely on sight, we had the opportunity to utilize this and find ways to convey the taste of the food without just using words (in our case we established a rule where each post must be accompanied by a picture or something of the similar nature). Of course what is explained here can be applied to other topics, however, food was the easiest to work with within our timeframe.

What were the largest challenges with a team assignment?
Like described in the previous question the major difficulty our group faced were communication and language barriers. Since the majority of students grew up using English as a secondary or a supplementary language, a task that involves writing is naturally a huge challenge. Thus relating to language and cultural barriers, choosing a topic also became a problem in our group. This is because the ranging number of interests each member has was not uniform and thus leading us to indecision.

Another challenge relating to indecision was choosing the layout of the blog. On assumption, this must be a common problem as it is inevitable that each group member would have differing views for the best layout. But after research and compromise our group agreed to use a premade free layout from blogskins.com. It was the easiest and the quickest solution which was an ideal answer to our problem.

Another problem our group faced was creating a gmail account. This didn’t hinder us, however, it provided us with a headache at the beginning. Since one is required to use a gmail account to create a blogger account therefore we had to create a new gmail account that we could all access. What we faced was choosing a username that hasn’t been used (hadn’t expected it to be that difficult), choosing a password that google agreed to and finally connecting everyone’s gmail accounts to our blogger account so that we could each blog separately. The latter was the hardest out of the three as regardless of the amount of emails and draft posts were used, there were members who didn’t understand the idea and didn’t comply with the group’s requirement. The main reason for this was due to language barriers. Nevertheless, after clarification in our practical lesson, we were able to overcome every challenge we were faced with.

How did you come up with the final design that you used?
Like mentioned previously, our final layout was one that our whole group could agree on after using vast amounts of time to discuss it. Despite being a premade layout, it suited our blog’s theme, focus and each member’s tastes. We had initially considered using one that was professional looking with earnest looking boxes and all, however, after realizing our level of blogging we decided to degrade our blog style to informal and casual thus resulting in an informal and casual looking blog.

Choosing a layout which utilizes vectors instead of photographs was the first step of being comfortable with our style. Secondly, the amount of colours used greatly contributes to the style – professional looking blogs use a consistent three colours at most, therefore we chose a blog that had a consistent colour scheme yet didn’t limit the number of colours used. Thirdly, we had to decide on where each widget was to go. Of course there were the basic task requirements that we had to satisfy such as having the “About me” on the right and blog roll but we had the freedom of putting other elements onto our sidebars. Since our task requires people to make comments, the first thing we decided to do was create a chatbox on the side. Of course there were a number of issues we had to consider such as foul language but since our task required us to blog regularly, therefore, it was easy to monitor the comments. We then agreed to use the standard widgets such as labels/tags, archive etc and place them on the sidebars in an organised fashion.

Compare a blog that has similar content to yourself, critically analyse your site comparing theirs

Site: http://thefoodblog.com.au/

The Food Blog is more or less the professional blog style we had initially thought of using. Since we downgraded our style from professional to casual, our blog appears to have a lot of blemishes compared to The Food Blog. One obvious difference is the style of writing. It uses a conversational and humourous tone which captivates the readers. This is something our blog will never reach.

Another thing appealing about The Food Blog is that its layout is clean, crisp and organized. To some extent, our two sidebar layout is neat yet navigational wise it is poor. Since all the widgets aren’t ordered in any importance, the readers will have to search for the widget they need e.g. tags rather than being guided to it. Design elements could improve this problem such as numbering, colours etc however this makes the blog appear more unprofessional than it already is. The Food Blog, on the other hand, is able to employ its only sidebar to provide information in order of importance which makes this blog really appealing.

Furthermore, The Food Blog provides high resolution photos thus, even without appealing to the sense of taste or smell, readers can already taste the dish from the sense of sight. This is something our blog could work on (i.e. SLRs or better camera pixels or editing photo on photoshop can be used to improve photo quality). In relation to this, The Food Blog’s writer also appears to have some knowledge of photography and design. This is seen through the ways the photographs are taken and presented. In order for us to reach that we would need some training.

Moreover, The Food Blog appears more credible than our blog. This is clearly based on the writing. Our blog uses too much slang, emoticons, capital letters, font colour and ellipses making the blog appear overly friendly and sometimes just plain silly. The Food Blog on the other hand appears reserved yet friendly through its tone.

Lastly, The Food Blog has more of a variety in its content while our blog, for some reason, has a tendency to promote Asian cuisine. This isn’t a bad thing yet since we claim to be a blog about food, not Asian food, there should be more variety in our food choices. What we admire about The Food Blog is the amount of detail the writer is able to go into about a certain dish or sauce etc which is something our blog has problems with (our post tend to be very short).

In summary, The Food Blog is a popular blog with a fairly big readership. This is credible to the whole make up of their blog and their regular updates. After comparing our blog to such a professional looking blog, there is clearly a lot of tweaking that our blog needs.