Hi everybody! Happy almost summer 🙂
For my final project, I created a website, linked here, to house the stories of former Soviet figure skaters at the Olympic Games. Initially, I was hoping to include all sorts of fancy tricks and tools like timelines and maps and clever icons. While I didn’t quite fit all of these features in, I am pleased with the result of the website, which is really more of a blog. I used Google Sites because I wanted my platform to be simple and easy to use, but I also wanted to create the website without asking too much of myself and my technological skills (which are minimal). Google Sites allowed me to get creative, create clean and functional web pages, and also include videos and images. The content centers on eight Winter Olympic Games from 1968 to 2022, and each page highlights certain skaters or scandals or significant moments that took place during those games. I loved the research aspect of this project, and I could have happily continued researching all these intriguing stories. If I do continue working on this site, I would love to expand it to become a definitive history of Soviet skaters in the Winter Olympics.
Were I to go back to the beginning of the semester and start this project anew, I think I would choose to challenge myself a little bit more technologically and use a platform such as WordPress or Wix to create my site. I loved the ease of Google Sites, but I think it would have been more of a learning experience to experiment with a more complicated platform. But now that I have all the content, I could always try to move the site onto another platform.
I hope you find some of these Olympic Games as fascinating as I do. So much of figure skating is beauty and elegance and athleticism, but there is a lot of behind-the-scenes craziness at play too. Hopefully, this website gives its visitors some insight into how complicated and often problematic the figure skating world is. I love skating dearly, but I recognize how messed up elite figure skating can be. Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I am so proud of my finished product!
https://sites.google.com/student.american.edu/skating-soviet/home?authuser=0
–Molly Foster