Practicum 3 - Personal Homepage Programming

I don't remember much of my HTML days in middle school. It's been a tedious process looking up and implementing codes for background color, hyperlinks, photo and video insertion, and tables. But the problem is, with a basic HTML knowledge, I don't feel like I can do much more than what you'd see on any rudimentary website from about 10 years ago. I don't have the time to invest in learning entirely new programming languages, but I believe they are necessary to make a personal homepage interesting.

People expect flashy and interactive websites, ones with polls, fancy designs and fonts, and built-in widgets for Facebook or even media players. Personal homepages suffer in this regard because, like me, most people do not have that extensive knowledge and ambition for attempting to make a personal website wanes. Most of these web programming classes, like Java or CSS, are only available at a college-level education. There are a lot of people that cannot afford to take these classes at the university's prices. Many people also would fail to see the value in the classes if they are not planning on editing web content for a living. With free social networking websites that do all the formatting for you, most would opt not to pay for a class to teach you how to do it.

The other major issue is how much hard work is involved. Just because you took a class on Java doesn't mean you have the ability to make a schnazzy website. In fact, it often takes years of classes and practice. My roommate, a computer science major, still struggles with the basics and his assignments that involve editing code take hours to complete. Errors are also very hard to find in code so making a really good website often requires someone with incredible attention to detail. Again, going through all that is not appealing when you could just hop on Facebook and have them do it for you, and there lies the fundamental problem in keeping personal homepages alive.