Over the duration of this assignment, Kyle Kim and I (Andrew Savory) looked at each of the various platforms that were available to us for the purpose of creating a legitimate and informative online museum exhibit based on Pop-Culture references in David Young's "Glenn." In the end we chose Yola as our platform because, although it wasn't on the list of the recommended, it provided countless benefits and a quick learner's guide for how to utilize the site in order to maximize the ultimate success of our final project.
With so many resources at our disposal, there was absolutely no possibility of this website being anything short of a success. Yola provided areas where you could bring links from Youtube to your page, special formatting tools to improve the presentations of your website, unlimited online storage space for photos and audio clips, hundreds of backgrounds to choose from and a widgetbox gallery where we were enabled the opportunity to bring songs and various files from our own personal computers and then bring them to life on our website.
Unfortunately, along with the advantageous aspects of Yola, came with the disadvantageous aspects of Yola. Configuring photos to be the correct size was difficult and the size manipulator didn't always cooperate which made creating the site increasingly stressful. Furthermore, our biggest difficulty was getting music to play on each of the web pages. Such a task posed monumental mountains for Kyle and I to climb because in a collaborative effort we had to:
1) Change the file name of our audio clips.
2) Upload them to the website.
3) Then open the files link on it's own private URL.
4) Copy the URL.
5) Open up a Google Audio Player using the widgetbox gallery tool provided by Yola.
6) Paste the audio files private URL into the Google Audio Player's HTML feed.
7) Lastly, allow the music to begin playing whenever any user navigates to the online museum's server.
A few adjustments that I would make to Yola would be to update the server for a better software to allow the uploading of pictures without having to worry about size conflicts. Also, the audio uploading software should function more easily without being too complicated and having misleading steps that were poorly explained. A variety of font sizes and colours posed another problem when we wanted to present our writings with particular fonts that was not supported by Yola. Although these problems existed, we are determined to recommend this helpful site to anyone who wishes to create a webpage. There were drawbacks, but these drawbacks did not harm the core value of our project, they were only minor.
In conclusion, together Kyle and I faced many issues and dilemma's when creating "The Iron Curtain of Gould Museum." But these problems would have been faced with every other platform because we had done ample research and had sample tested each of the other platforms. By doing this, we decided that Yola to had these difficulties, but it also had the most resources and solutions to conquer these issues and eventually create a site to our liking.
The song that is currently playing is an small excerpt from one of Kyle and I's personal favourites, "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg.
Below is also a "How to Use Yola Video" which greatly attributed to our success in the creation of our online museum.
Page by: Andrew Savory and Kyle Kim
