I chose to present my project as a website instead of on other media because I was having difficulty organizing my project into a linear paper and I am very familiar with website development so I could make my project exist as a non-linear tree with as many branches (tangents) as I felt necessary. I believe the website will make my project more interesting and more likely to be read, understood, and its information and findings utilized by readers. The website is the best way to publish the included graphics, photos, and charts.

The website gives me more creativity into how I connect information (via hyperlinks), and removes the software barriers that can be built by PDF and desktop publishing software (namely Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word). HTML is inherently more accesible than Portable Document Format and Word documents.

My goals with publishing online are thus:

• Widespread distribution. Having the project published online on a publicly-accessible will increase the number of potential readers.
• Speed. The project and excerpts from the project can be shared quickly.
• Discussion. Every page in the project has a comments section that allows anyone to post.
• Updating. The website is a “live document.” I can easily update it when things change, to correct errors, or to incorporate new information

The Wiki software, DokuWiki, gives me so many powerful tools that either Microsoft Word lacks, or take more time than I believe they should.

• Faster styling - If I want to style text, I just type it into the source code. It's faster to use the keyboard then to use my mouse and click on the styles in the formatting bar. Also, styles in Word sometimes become corrupted and won't update as you change them.
• Better headings - Headings in Word must be created as styles (read “Faster styling” on why Wiki beats Word here, too). Headings in Wiki are created with source code and styled with CSS.
• Reference database - Word has a “Citation Source Manager” that allows you to manage your bibliography or works cited. But it's footnote manager isn't as robust as the “refnotes” plugin for DokuWiki. I can create a table of footnotes (or terms and definitions for a glossary) and have them referenced with a simple code; in Word, to repeat a footnote, you would have to scroll through your entire document to find out which footnote you want to repeat, copy the dynamic footnote link, scroll back to the repeat location, and then paste the dynamic footnote.
• Easier cross referencing - Being the web and using HTML, I can create simple hyperlinks that lead to any page and section in my Wiki site.
• Search - Presents findings as a results list, instead of paging through them one by one like Word does.

• Printing. So far, I have not yet found a suitable plugin that exports the entire site to a PDF document. There are several plugins that will export pages individually, at which point I can merge the pages into a single file. This is time consuming. As I note, though on the homepage, I prefer that readers view the project online. Lastly, the siteexport plugin will export the project to static HTML; you can then use Acrobat Professional to convert the webpages to PDF but the results are less than professional.