My first draft for this project consisted of a series of articles (shown in the PDF to the left), and a very rough version of a website.  The link to that is nzingas.wix.com/studentfitness.

 

Upon turning in my draft, I had a lot of questions, and many concerns on how it would be received by others outside the sphere of my own head.   The feedback I received  was amazingly constructive, not only to my piece, but also to my confidence as well.  I was struggling to put my whole heart into this project before I received feedback, because, well, I wasn’t quite sure where it was going, or where it could go.  But through talking with my blog group and Shelley about my piece, I had regained much of my confidence and passion for this project, and was ready to make this project into something special.

 

Here’s some of what I did between then and now:

 

• Revise for a more targeted audience.   I started with the goal of addressing all college students, but once my posts started taking form, I could see that most of my experience and recommendations relates mostly to guys.   That’s not because I didn’t want to reach a wider audience, but it just worked better when I addressed guys.  Focusing on college men has helped be more specific with my messages, hopefully making it more relatable for my audience.

• Revisit the comments I received.  The biggest piece of advice off of the first draft was that I needed to source my work, and figure out how to do that in a website.  So in my final, I hyperlinked, added videos, and integrated scientific research to make my articles much more credible.  I also added a section for “Further Reading” that links to my annotated bibliography.

• Reformat the piece so it’s publishable.   This was my very first attempt at creating a website, and it was very much of a learning process.  But once I figured it out, I think I came up with a clean, multimodal website that is appealing to the eye of college students, even those with super-short attention spans (probably most, myself included).

• Revisit the original paper I am repurposing and rethink my overall goals. Although all my articles address different topics, they should be all be contributing to the overarching goal of staying fit while balancing college pressures.  So I had to come up with a theme that united the site—and I did that by dividing the articles into three things that are necessary for college fitness—getting strong, staying strong, and finding time.