Our team decided to base on blog on a common interest. As there were only two of us we quickly came up with sport, namely the various football codes. We split up the work by deciding that I (Bay) write on the NRL, and my partner Phorner would write about the AFL and we would split Rugby union between us.
As far as challenges are concerned there were not a great deal. The biggest one we had was probably communicating with each other, as we rarely got an opportunity to speak. Also interest. I think I would be correct in saying that neither of us are, or ever will be interested in blogging. It seems to be an area for those who want to get into or have been involved with journalism or are particularly passionate about a certain topic. Unfortunately neither of us are on both fronts. That been said it was interesting to know how to put a blog together and I did learn how to upload a video to a blog after a few attempts.
As far as final design goes it was pretty straight forward. We simply uploaded a patch of grass as the background so it looked like a playing field and stuck to a black background so the content was easy to read. We knew that the content is the most important thing about a blog and I think our articles are pretty good and well researched.
We didn't model our blog on any other website. The site itself was pretty easy to understand as far as making a design and adding content. As far as our site vs other sites are concerned they are pretty similar. Blogger seems to be a pretty powerful tool. The main differences between our site and proper blogging sites would be how often the site was updated. Our site was usually updated at the end of the weekend sports, with usually 2 or 3 stories going up on Monday. Other sites were updated on a daily basis and the more professional sites had a more polished feel about them.
Agreed. Having the assignment given to us with only 2 people in the group was certainly challenging. We did as much, if not more than probably other people may have done and I think we can take pride in knowing that the content was contrasted between opinion and match reporting. We certainly both respect the idea of a blog, the way it is set-up, the constant updating and time that goes into writing such a thing, but as Bay said, it's probably not something we would choose to do on a regular basis.
ReplyDeleteWe used videos and images to give the blog a bit more of a designed feel which I think was at the right balance. We believed there was nothing worse than having a blog which was saturated in photos or flashing banners etc. We just wanted to keep it simple and make it all about the content.
As for finding a similar blog to ours, one of the things we thought about the current blogosphere was that there was a lot of blogs for technology updates (new iPhones, PC's, Games etc) and lots of blogs about shopping (clothes and shoes etc) and not so much an opinion on sport and predictions for the season. In order to keep the content fresh, the best time to blog was after the weekend when all matches had been played and we could get a good feel of the weekend's games and see which ones were the best to write about. It was also interesting to hear the opinions of Bay and his writing about sports and we both shared a common disappointment in the one team (Waratahs) which we took turns in writing about.