Before starting with the design of my blog I already had some ideas of how I want it to look like eventually, so I didn’t want a theme that limits these ideas. In my decision process, I tried several themes and looked at the demos. However, the demos didn’t show all the options the particular themes offer. In the end, I did a bit of trial and error and went for the theme “Colibri WP”. This is because, in comparison to the other themes, it offers a lot of options: From the customization of the colours, fonts, order to the header design.

Features and Functionalities

Right at the beginning of my homepage I included a YouTube video. The video has two functionalities: 1. To take advantage of the several possibilities a blog as a medium offers. 2. It gives an introduction to the topic of Digital Media Studies and therefore introduces to what my blog will be about.

For the “Courses” Page I use the Plugin “Flipbox” because it is an interesting way to link to the both courses “Transformations in Digital Cultures” and “Real Virtualities”. Both courses are represented by Categories, not by pages, and therefore descriptions cannot be included. I think this is a good way to do introduce to the courses.

Problems

I quickly realized that designing a blog is not as easy and straightforward as it may seem. As mentioned before, I already had clear ideas of how I wanted my blog to look like but it turned out that some aspects aren’t possible (for my theme) or I just need a long time to figure out how to do it. Moreover, there are things I would like to change for which pro versions of the theme are needed.