Reflection

Building a weblog had been made easy through the available templates that are offered by various web hosting sites. Any individual can just build up their personal space within just a click. The process of creating a serious weblog may seem very much complicated compared to the production of other genre materials as it is essential to provide references and acknowledgment to the contents that are written as readers would prefer to read credible articles. Apart from that, references also avoids fallacies of the contents published and to strengthen an argument (Windshuttle & Elliot 1999) .

Several points had to be considered during the process of creating and maintaining a blog. Some of it are:

• composition of the website such as salience, framing and layout spread of the website to encourage readability and easy navigation (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006). Main contents are placed in the middle of the blog with links and other related materials are framed at the sidebar for easier search of contents.
  

• multimodality which encourages interactivity and engage readers with the organisation itself (Walsh 2006). Images are placed to provide visuals and understandings to readers where as related materials are linked through hyperlinks as readers will tend to click around (Nielsen 2000).
  

• affordance of each mode that are being used, placing emphasis on their special functions to maximise their features to gain benefits (Schriver 1997).
  

• audience, purpose of the weblog and cultures of the potential audience so that meanings can be effectively presented while preserving the cultures and understandability of the audience.

Last but not least, ethics in blogging are also important as this determines the acceptance of the weblog among the public. Sensitive issues are to be handled professionally to avoid misunderstandings and unwanted attentions. Through this weblog, I have came to realise that bloggers do have their responsibilities and to take adequate considerations in creating and maintaining the weblogs to ensure that the weblog is properly designed collaborated with useful information.

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References:

Nielsen, J 2000, 'Chapter 3: Content design', Designing web usability, New Riders, Indianapolis.

Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., NY.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘Textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts,’ Australian journal of language and literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24-37.

Windshuttle, K & Elliot, E 1999, Writing, researching, communication: communication skills for the information age, McGraw-Hill, Sydney.