For many years I have wanted to learn to ‘make’ a website. A few years ago, while exploring the possibility of starting an online business, I registered a domain name, paid for website hosting and thought that I could learn how to create a website with a shopping platform on my own. I remember that I was overwhelmed, and just could not make sense of the process. The language was foreign, nothing seemed intuitive and I lacked the foundational knowledge that I could build upon to make sense of even where to start to begin. I admitted it was too big of an undertaking to do on my own at that time. Also, as the business opportunity did not come to fruition, I no longer had the need to make a website.

         A couple months ago, I started working for a Not For Profit Food Security organization called MWFR. Their website was created about 5 years ago, and for the last 2 years, they have not been able to access it. It was in need of updating and structural changes to reflect the organization’s current situation. MWFR was unable to make any changes or update information, as they did not know the password, or how to get one reset. I gained access and started to poke around in this WordPress website. I started making changes and correcting out of date information. While exploring their website, I found that if there was something I could not figure out how to do, that I could do an online search to find resources to help guide me. WordPress has lots of information available on it including online blogs, YouTube videos, and instructional resources. I even started to think that perhaps I would be able to create a new website for them using the WordPress platform.

         One of the pages on the MWFR website, has an embedded Google Calendar. This calendar was linked to 2 other calendars, and was supposed to display the entries from the three calendars. These three calendars were managed by three employees in three geographic locations. At some point recently, the Calendar stopped showing events from the multiple calendars and the colour coding that was attached to them. I am not sure if the cause was either a result of my poking around, out of failure to keep the website functionality updated, or for some other reason. I performed online searches to try to find out how to correct this problem, and found some suggestions including installing a calendar ‘plugin’. Unfortunately, nothing I did seemed to work. I realized that again, I lacked foundational knowledge about WordPress and that in this instance, I was just trying things blindly.

These three factors;

• a previous desire to learn to produce a website
• MWFR needing considerable adjustments to their website (or perhaps even a new one)
• and the need to correct the unfunctional embedded Google calendar in MWFR’s website

combined to provide me with rationalization to focus my self- directed learning on these two goals (a) learn how to create a basic website using the WordPress platform, and (b) learn how to embed into this website a Google Calendar which displays events from multiple calendars in a single calendar.

Subject Rationale ⇒