What a labour of love this became.....I decided to turn my MA dissertation into a web site. No idea why apart from when this "thing" cropped up it co-incided with me thinking about how I could retrieve an electronic copy of my dissertation.
Let that be a lesson - you constantly need to update the work you have created - order for the technology you are working with to cope with the files you have created.
Retrieving my dissertation from an ancient Mac Classic was the hardest thing I had to do (not me really but Kevin's know-how and a portable 3.5 inch disc drive). Plus re-creating the bibliography using ref works - the launch of the new version of refworks was an ideal opportunity to try to do what students have to do and create a bibliography from a variety of sources - some sources worked better with refworks than others.
I was also thinking about what students might want to do with a google site - I know that they are using them in schools such as MAD to create an electronic portfolio - but I wondered if it would work for a piece of written work.
I'm quite pleased with the end results
https://sites.google.com/a/staff.westminster.ac.uk/electricity-for-women/ - I think it works quite well as a web site. Although I had all the content which I cut and paste into the document, I've spent quite a lot of time "tweaking" it and trying to change it (whilst trying to keep the integrity and flow of the thesis) to reflect that it is now a web site - so I've begun including Hypertext links and images (not readily available when I wrote it!.. yes of course there were pictures then, just not online..!)
I especially liked the create a contents list feature (a bit Wikipedia) and addded it to each page; it was very effective and easy to do - making navigation really simple.Although I aborted my first attempt at a website (and still have to work out how to delete it...anyone?) - This second attempt was much smoother and easy to revisit and re-edit.
I'm still having a few problems - namely with the navigation menu - two of my later pages aren't in quite the same format although they work with and link to the home page. I've also got a problem with analytics - I can't quite work out how to add them to the site as I think the template is muddying the HTML. Because of the subject matter I wanted the site to be available to everyone and was interested in the number of hits I got.
The search feature is fantastic - but it's a shame you can only see where your key words are - you can't go directly to that section
Although I didn't explore all of the functions and ad-ons, I quickly got to the stage of its limitations e.g. it works well, you can quickly create something that looks half-way decent - but sometimes you might want to take it a bit fuirther and learn a bit more. Perhaps we could conside using it to create/present our annual reports to teh school?
Top tip - never have a different google account for blogger and then for google site - it seems to confuse blogger - this is the third time I''ve edited this post!
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