Weblog Reflection

What skills have you gained regarding writing to an audience?

When writing articles for a weblog I quickly came to realise a few things. The first was that readability played a hug roll, having large blocks of text was an instant turn off and therefore they naturally needed to be broken up so that the audience would remain interested.

Regarding my target audience, I tried to keep my range as broad as possible so I kept the format of my writing and how it was broken up in a professional looking sense but also casual looking enough so that it would not immediately turn off readers.

In my writing recently I had begun to write things as statements or factual documents as I have been writing nothing but assignments but when writing for the weblog I tried to keep my audience in mind the whole time. I wrote as if trying to provoke discussion, I did this by using open ended statements that also hinted at a direct answer, leaving room for community input into the conversation.

What skills did you gain regarding design?

My goal for design was to keep things simple, but also active looking by adding colours, pictures etc, so that it would remain professional but not boring looking.

I tried to break up the text with paragraph spacing, relevant pictures and titles making the article much easier to read and understand as well as enjoyable.

For my general blog design, I chose a simple design that placed the sidebar on the right with a short snippet of text and leading picture for each article in the centre. By setting things out this way I gave my audience more options to chose from straight away, this was an important skill to learn because I was able to understand how an audience will likely respond to my content based on the initial visual impression as well as the rest of the visual content on the blog.

What is your view on blogging?

For a period of about eight months I used to run a blog myself that specialised in all things anime related, reviews, discussions and industry movements where all apart of my blog and from that I learned the power of blogging.

In short my view is a positive one, it allowed me to interact and engage in discussion in a semi-professional environment and improved my writing skills and knowledge of the internets functions considerably.

Blogging itself can be a powerful tool, however it does take a considerable amount of effort to run a successful blog and therefore shows that it is not all that different from a regular news or social media website with the except that you retain all the control.

Blogging is widespread and seems to blur lines with professional news mediums in many ways as of late, which in turn brings about more and also less opportunity in the industry. The reason I say this is that with so many options of news and entertainment becoming readily available with blogs it draws attention away from less specifically targeted professional outlets in and therefore less jobs are required. At the same time, blogs and the like have in many case lead to the creation of professional businesses so it’s a two sided coin.

Overall I have gained many skills in this assignment, through understand my audience, to the format of my writing to the appearance and design of my blog I believe I am a much more knowledgeable person having completed this assignment.