Week of 2/2/2009 Blog Post

Question: Share the best website URL you can that models what you think a good homepage like the one you want to build looks like. Why does it do what you want your's to do? Please include information from the reading you've been doing as well.

I am struggling with example URLs for my homepage as I have struggled with the topic for my homepage and actually physically creating it. I have been imagining what content that I wanted on my homepage and how I want it to work without thinking about the best examples of homepages that I can find, but I will try to point out some pages that I think are well designed and some that are less well designed.

I personally like the Hungry Girl page. The colors are too bright for my personal taste, but I like the content and the movement. The scrolling ticker is a nice touch, and, if I can think of the type of content that would lend itself to such movement, might be something that I would try to incorporate into my personal page.

I prefer the color scheme on the Weight Watchers homepage. The more muted colors appeal to my tastes.

Jonny Bowden’s website incorporates a blogger.com blog and a video at the bottom. I like both of these touches. I also like the navigation bar at the top where the user can click through to the different sections of the page including the blog. I also like the continuity between the blog page and the rest of the page.

The Rapid Weaver program that I am using had a blog page template, but I scrapped that idea for my homepage because of the difficulty in dealing with comments. I am currently modifying the HTML on the two blogger.com blogs that we created to attempt to get that seamless appearance. I am still learning HTML so it took me several hours to get them as far as I have. Because my husband was demanding his turn at the computer and because of the eye strain, I stopped with it partially done.

In my opinion, the Make Goal website is a weak example of a website in the area in which I wish to create my homepage. It is one main page with external links to external webpages. Although it has a video section and a calculator, which are nice features, it appears to be disorganized.

I am still looking for artist pages that are good examples of artists’ pages, although I did find a page dedicated to templates for artists to use to build websites to showcase and sell their art.

The reading this week discussed the linearity of text and the passage of time in art and text. Meadows makes the point that even though text is linear, authors use devices like foreshadowing to make the text appear non-linear, while artists use breaks between panels to show a passage of time in comic strips and similar media. In website design, a webpage may have chunks of very linear text with imbedded links, much like I did in the blog above. The reader may choose to follow the link and jump to another page or topic away from the original text, yet when they jump back to the original text, it should still be there, unchanged, as though no time has passed. Does this make the webpage text more linear or less linear than the text in a book? Or is text, just text and always the same regardless of where it is displayed?

RapidWeaver

To any of my classmates with limited funds and a Mac, I used a program called RapidWeaver to create my website. I paid $49 for RapidWeaver at the Apple Store in Easton Town Center and upgraded it on the website to the latest version for free. To buy the latest version on the website is $79. I also downloaded additional scripts and plug-ins for free.

I like Rapid Weaver, but I have never used Dreamweaver either, so I can't really compare. I created the website listed in the post below entirely using RapidWeaver. I did run into some challenges, but I went to the Forum on the RapidWeaver site and searched my problem to find the answer. I found the answer easily each time. I still need to work on modifying the website below, but I am confident that I can do it with RapidWeaver.

According to the RapidWeaver website, "The RapidWeaver Sandwich file format (.rwsw) is a completely open file format. We call them "RapidWeaver Sandwiches" because it's easy to open them up and see the filling. In the Finder, they’re viewed as normal ‘bundles’ however inside it’s all developer-friendly XML.

This allows anyone to add new pages or modify settings outside of RapidWeaver, and more importantly gives third party developers the opportunity to write new and exciting products based around the RapidWeaver sandwich format. File formats have never looked so tasty!"

I thought that I would share this in case any of my classmates also looked at the price of Dreamweaver and choked a little.

The first version of my homepage is up

The first version of my homepage is now up. I know that it still needs much work, and I will be changing things as I continue to learn how to make the changes. The URL is http://happyhealthyjessica.com. A friend of my husband is hosting the site on his server.

Week of 1/26/2009 Blog Post

Question: Comment on communication, transparency, and participation (the three points listed on the WhiteHouse site), and if/how those three point fit into your homepage and your second (re)design project.

The entire point of a webpage would seem to be communication. Why have a website at all if it does not communicate something? If not something important to a large community, it should at least be something important to the person creating the website. This was a large part of my struggle in the deciding what to put on my homepage. What did I want to communicate with others? I decided that I wanted to communicate the story of my weight loss struggle. My weight loss is very meaningful to me; it saved my life. Maybe, if I do it right, I can help some others too. In addition, my professional work belongs to my employer; they hold the copyright to all of it. Therefore it does not belong on my website.

I think that transparency is essential to good communication. For my personal website, I have to be transparent in my story to establish the trust of the readers. If the reader/user does not develop a trust relationship with me, why would they continue to read my website or listen to my thoughts and ideas.

Participation is the most difficult thing for me to incorporate into my personal website, but it is the key to success for websites. Yes, the reader/user will be reading the sit, following links, and perhaps commenting on the blogs that I intend to include. But how do I develop that deeper participation and interaction that makes a website a success. I am still thinking about that aspect. I have been working diligently on the framework for my homepage. It is taking my a great deal of effort just to put the basics together at this time, but I will get there, and I am enjoying the process.

The degree to which communication, transparency, and participation will be applied to the artist’s homepage is entirely up to the artist; I can only suggest and perhaps attempt to show the importance of these things to the artist. I have not yet put a great deal of thought into what I will do specifically for the artist because I am still working on learning about web design. I would prefer to make the vast majority of my mistakes on my own page and provide the artist with my best work.

The updated White House site is an attempt to move toward communication, transparency, and participation. How successful this will be and how truly the designers will embrace the concepts is yet to be seen. By the very nature of the job, there must be limits on how much transparency President Obama can employ. For example, the debate over the dangers of his Smart Phone. Nothing can be posted that would allow someone to seek out the President, his family, staff, etc. for nefarious purposes. While the ideals may be grand, the execution will by necessity be limited.

Week of 1/19 Blog Post

Question: What is interactive narrative and in what ways does it relate to websites? Use examples. What narrative elements do you find in most websites? One of your assignments is to create your own homepage. What do you want your homepage to say?

An interactive narrative is one that draws the user or reader into the subject. What type of interaction will work is largely dependent on the perspective of the user. For example, when my uncle first accessed the internet, he was disappointed that it involved so much reading; he wanted something more like TV or the movies, where the story was told to him by someone else with associated pictures. Bilgil's "History of the Internet" is an example of the type of narrative that my uncle desired that was not readily available when he started using the internet. The story is told to the reader/user along with associated graphics. My uncle's topic of choice would be much different, but that is another discussion. In contrast to my uncle, I enjoy reading the text on web pages and find that I can read the same information more quickly than it can be presented in video presentations; however, I agree that multimedia helps to catch the readers/users' interest and pull them into the world presented on the web page. One website that I visit frequently is Hungry Girl. This website features a ticker that runs the latest story posted to the site, along with links to Hungry Girl approved products and an ask Hungry Girl section. Hungry Girl tells a story that captures the attention of those who are trying to enjoy favorite foods, while maintaining a reasonable size. Another example of an interactive website is Facebook. Members of Facebook can track down friends, play games, and interact in the virtual world. My employer, ACS Publications, is also moving to a more interactive website by providing ACS members with the ability to blog, interact on wikis, link articles to Facebook, Digg, etc., and to receive podcasts, among other things. ACS Chemical Biology has the most-developed interactive page of the ACS journals with an "Ask the Expert" section, a wiki, podcasts, and "Thematic Compilations".

I have been struggling with a topic for my personal website. My husband has suggested that I create a website focusing on my weight loss struggle. At first, I cast that idea aside because that is a very personal and embarrassing topic that has been well covered by others (for example, Hungry Girl, Kim Benson, Pamela Mallow, etc.), but the more I think about it, the more I am leaning toward that topic. I want my website to speak about determination and to maybe help someone else.

First Post

I created this blog for my Online Publishing Class at Texas Tech (ENGL 5376).

My name is Jessica Badger. This is my third class in the MATC program at TTU. I have B.S. in Combined Sciences from Youngstown State University in Youngstown, OH. I am currently employed by the American Chemical Society, and I live in Columbus, OH.