Rudai 7: Online exhibition

This post title should really be called the trials and tribulations of the online exhibition. I've had a difficult relationship with this task from the start - I didn't really get what was expected of us, I had concerns over copyright issues of turning a poster or brochure into a blog, and I'm just not sure what we were asked to do fitted with the blog theme of online exhibitions. But thanks to advise from my tutor I eventually managed to settle on a theme for my blog, and decided to use family history photos as the source for creating an online exhibition using a blog format. Here is the link to my blog:

Those Who Came Before Us

I didn't find this as easy as I thought it would. I did have a plan for what I wanted but struggled to find the right bit of blogger to action what I wanted to do. I should have spent some time reading up on using blogger in advance rather wasting hours trying to work things out and getting very frustrated. But, eventually I worked out how to create pages (I was looking for tabs) adjust colours sizes and insert images. The layout of images i found very frustrating as I couldn't get the layout of these how I wanted.  Eventually i left them in a muddled state and gave up. What I found very helpful was eventually deciding that as I had content on the blog, that I would try a different blog style to see if that helped me get the look I wanted. I cannot tell you the joy that I felt when I changed it to its present style - which I then realised was the same as my Rudai blog! Never mind. I'm happy with it and decided to put the images to one in a row with captions which I am now a lot happier with. I asked a few friends for comments and they were pleased with it especially the layout of the images which they thought worked well on mobile devices.

I would say I found looking at the how to guides on Rudai 7 quite helpful in working out how to adjust some settings. I'm not sure if I had to do an online exhibition for work whether blogger is the site I would use. I would perhaps look towards online exhibition specific software, a website or even face book, though I would need much more information on what the exhibition was for, how people would be expected in interact with the site etc. But which ever format I would choose, planning is they key and having an idea of desired format is very useful.

While showing this site to a work colleague, our history department are now keen in investigating how we an use blogs and online images to support the kids learning and providing online resource banks. So this experience will come in very useful both privately and professionally.

Despite all my moans about this task, I do now have a blog now which I intend to keep up and share with my family, and this wouldn't have been developed without Rudai 23. Thank you.