Rationale

I chose to make a online exhibition about Sweden. The choice of topic was partly because it is something that I know by heart, since I am from there, and partly because I don’t there is any good sites about Sweden out there. When you find a website about a country you’ll find that it feeds you with stereotypes. This is somewhat necessary in order to describe traditions, the people and general facts about the country. This is however often not how people really live or how they really behave. My heart especially lies in the page about Stockholm. If you go to Stockholm as a tourist you won’t fond the good places. You just won’t, unless you really make an effort. I felt like this was a great opportunity to make a proper website about Sweden that would show another side of the country and the people.
When I started this project I looked around on different ways of publish this website. I tried to work with Dreamweaver, iWeb and blogspot. None of those ways of producing website suited my purposes so I had a look at Wordpress. This suited my project because of the easy way of creating new pages. On the other hand you have very limited ways of controlling the layout but since this project didn’t involve designing in that sense it didn’t bother me too much. You could however go in and change the html of the pages. Since I have never worked with html before this unit, it was a great challenge to understand and manage a small website and see how it is built up. I started of with building up my different categories. This included a lot of research and required me to narrow down the content on my web page. First I hade eight or nine different categories and then I narrowed it down to five (excluding references), which is much more manageable. I then created some under categories to create a bit more dimension to the page. I then started to create the network of information I needed to make my web page stand out towards other websites about Sweden. This was not only about writing the content on the different pages but also collect links and images that were suitable for the content.
The Different tools I’m using on the website is mostly RSS feeds from different sites. This much due to the porous of my website, which is to show Sweden from a different perspective, and for this flickr worked perfectly. With the help of yahoopipes I created a RSS feed from flickr showing images including the word “Sverige” (Sweden in Swedish). This gave me a perfect variety of images form summer, winter, south and north. Most of them are well-composed images that show a great side of Sweden. I also used the link widget to display other people’s work and show a broader collection of Swedish websites. When I chose these links I made sure that there were both official and unofficial material. One that I am particularly happy with is the “How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons”. This blog’s compliment my blog in a great way since it is written by a American middle aged man that is living in Sweden and is battling with all these Swedish social rules, where as I know the rules and have an other perspective on my blog. I have over all worked a lot with links since Wordpress is slightly restricted on adding widgets. There is a function where you’re supposed to be able to put in any html code as a text widget but I never got it to work and I suspect that it is not available for the web based blogs.
I have not during these project come a cross a website that is similar to mine, and I believe that is because not a lot of Swedish people decides to do a website about Sweden. I also think that the youthful perspective that I bring in to this website is unique. I think that the layout suits my content. It’s clean and easy, black and white features and a very square design. This match up with the Swedish minimalistic deign culture and also in many ways reflects the Swedish people, who are quite squared and reserved.
Most of the images have a Creative Commons license and there for only need an acknowledgment of the owner. On mu music page I have used images from last.fm, and they are all listed on my reference page.
This project really got me to realize how important these collectors of information’s are. The internet is a unlimited resource of information that is there for everyone to use, but in order to find what we’re looking for we need pages that organizes, collects and structures the material so it is easy to accesses and decrease the amount of time we have to spend to find the information we desire.