Visual Blog Journal

Purpose: To create a visual blog journal for communicating a special interest or hobby of yours to
an audience at-large. The following skills and knowledge are essential to success in your
professional life beyond this course:
Skills:
Using a content management system (CMS), like WordPress, Tumblr, or Wix to establish a blog
journal, including title, theme and URL.
Adding posts to the blog.
Incorporating images, embedded YouTube videos, slideshows, radio stations, and other multimedia
content.
Knowledge:
Writing five posts for one specific thematic topic.
Selecting and arranging images that are relevant to each blog post.
Respecting copyrights and avoiding plagiarism.
Task: Create a blog journal using a CMS, including theme, title and URL. Adding blog posts
incorporating text, images and multimedia. All steps are highly unique to your specific project,
therefore problem-solving and critical thinking skills are necessary.
Please read the lecture notes, “Blogging,” and view LinkedIn Learning: “WordPress Essential
Training” with Morten Rand-Hendriksen (Links to an external site.); before starting this project.
Decide on a title and thematic topic for your blog. It could be on anything! Possible blog topics
include (but are not limited to): travel journal, international recipe collection, sports news, clubbing
photo-journal, original poetry collection, original photography or art gallery, political commentary
journal, movie review journal, celebrity gossip journal, or many, many other possibilities.
Aim your blog at a mass audience. This will be a great project for all the journalism and PR majors
in this class. And if you’re not in journalism or PR, this project will enable you to get an idea of what
those majors entail.
Visit WordPress.com and open a free account. Don’t like WordPress? No problem. Your blog can be
created in any blog-hosting site.
Create the following:
A blog title.
One consistent thematic topic for your blog.
Select a WordPress theme, including writing the About or Bio content.
Select a URL (web address).
Create your first post:
Must consist of 100 words (minimum) to 200 words (maximum) for each post.
Incorporate relevant images. Select photographic images from Unsplash.com (Links to an external
site.) or Pexels.com, (Links to an external site.) or from any other site, but be sure to properly credit
the source (not Google, but rather Google’s link to the image’s original source website).
Embed YouTube videos and/or other multimedia.
Save and publish. VERY IMPORTANT: Be sure to make your blog public (or at least change privacy
settings to allow the class and instructor to view your blog). Be sure to write down the blog’s
PUBLIC URL, not the URL you as an admin use to log in.
Add at least four other postings that follow the same thematic topic before the due date.
Proper spelling, grammar and punctuation must be observed.