Approach 1-Austin H

Here is quick an early (but functional) version of my public blog site, The Samaritan’s Journal, designed on and hosted by WordPress as a free blog. Of course none of the design elements or content currently up is “final” in any sense, but it should serve to demonstrate the core of what I was aiming for with this idea:

https://thesamaritansjournal.wordpress.com

Any visitor can submit a story and any associated images or video via the “Submit a Journal Entry” option in the menu header. The content then gets emailed to me, at which point I can edit and post it as a proper blog post along with whatever extra content was provided. The home page, as intended, consists of just the most recent blog posts. Besides that, there’s the aforementioned submission page and an about page. I want the site content beyond the actual “journal entries” to be as minimal as possible. The bulk of the content should always be the stories themselves, with as few other distractions as possible.

Besides those pages, there’s also widgets for the site’s archives (i.e. previous posts based on month), and for prospective future use, links to the usual social media circles in the footer.

The site, again, if further iterated on, will undergo a lot of redesign (or at least as much as a free WordPress blog can allow), but regardless I invite anyone to submit their own stories to the site as if it were final. If I get emails (and their content is appropriate for my intent), I’ll actively post them. For now, it would help just to get a lot of stories up for the sake of demonstration.