Gbridge1987’s Weblog

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     I think that I am getting more comfortable with the content and the ideas that I want to execute for this website. I have gone to the comp. lab multiple times this week to give myself more time to sit down and play around with the programs and find a more organized and appealing layout for my website. As I get more familiar with the programs I am getting more comfortable with making the webiste. Also, as my website progresses I am collecting more information from outside sources to help add more text to my website. I am also thinking about adding a testimonal page to my website so that IPC majors can get an idea of what kinds of opportunities will be available to them upon graduation. I gave my presentation in class today and explained to my classmates what my plans are for designing my website and what my purpose for making the website is. I got some good feedback from some of my group members and I’m sure that there will also be good feedback on my discussion board that will help me in making my website better.

     On a side note I am excited because my birthday is this weekend and I will be turning 21

      As we are continuing to progress with this assignment, I am excited at the prospect of being able to produce a substantial website. However, I am finding it difficult take the image in my head that I have of making this website and transferring it onto paper, then transferring it a third time into Dreamweaver. I think that my apprehensions about my inexperience in photoshop and dreamweaver are stifiling my progress. I will take your suggestions from class today and make a more prioritized list of what steps I need to take to complete my website. Hopefully this well help me not feel so overwhelmed and it will allow me to make progress a little at a time and that way as I am adding all the different parts the outcome will be a more complete webiste.

     This week in class we began our student presentations. Our classmates present what they chose to do for their web porfolio/website projects and then give us insight as to what their final product will look like. They give us detailed information about their plans for the project and then when they are done we have time for discussion. I think so far the discussion sessions have gone very well.  Our classmates are given good feedback as to how they can improve their project plans and they are also given compliments for good ideas. I think this has been very helpful for people to get feedback as they go through this develoment process with their presentation. I am looking forward to my presentation day to get some outside opinion about my website.

     For this project so far, there have been a few different strategies that I have used to get to where I am now. The first thing that I have done is read/skimmed the articles that we have been assigned to read and underlined information and important points that I think will be beneficial to me as I work further on this project. The readings can sometimes be very helpful guidelines and often give specifics as to what I should be looking for and how I can make a more effective website.  Another strategy that I have used is brainstorming, i’ll allot a certain amount of time for myself to just write down any thoughts that I have about the project and just keep writing for that amount of time, then I will go back and reflect on what I have written to see how I can make sense of it and how I can categorize the information so that it will be helpful to me. A third strategy that I have used is research. I have been going to other colleges websites and looking how they present their campus organizations as well as looking as similarities and differences and then comparing and contrasting to the information I already have to work with. I am also doing more research on finding demographic information about this campus, so that I can get a better general idea of whom I will be appealing to as my primary target audience.

     With the information I have gathered so far, I have found that the website is used more as a tool to recruit people to the IPCO organization by telling what it has to offer and giving general information about the group as it is in the present as well as providing information of the work it has done in the past. This changes the way that I will be presenting the information of the website as well as the approach I will take in making my page design.

One of my next steps for this project will include more research. I think now that I have completed the audience analysis, I really need to focus on how that information will be presented on my website. Also, I planned to gain more information from the officers of IPCO to just get a feel for what they feel is needed to help let more people know about the IPCO organization on campus. I plan this to be the interview portion of my project. I think that I will continue to do some brainstorming and continue to refer back to the readings as necessary to help keep me going in the right direction.

     After completing my Webtext Review last week, this week has been more focused on researching and developing the design of my website, as well as going in depth to identify my audience. I found the article we read “A World of People and Puposes,” to be very helpful when trying to understand the specific focuses of what my audience should be. I think that this article will also be very helpful to me as I develop my Audience Analysis assignment. I think that so far in my efforts to complete this assignment, it has been easy enought to come up with a simple answer to each of questions asked, but it gets harder to go more in depth with my responses as I am still gathering how to interpret the information that I am getting from what IPCO has presented as their website, and the website that I feel will be more beneficial for the audience that I think they are trying to reach.

     This weekend I am traveling down with some students from IPCO to Athens, Ohio to run a 5k in support of the empowerment campaign which helps in the fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. On this trip I plan to gather a lot more information about the viewpoints officers in the IPCO organization by asking them their thoughts on the website/audience now and what improvements they think could be made. I also plan on gathering some statistics of the college that will be beneficial to me in figuring out the proportions of whom my target audience will be.

This week class consisted of heavily concentrating on our webtext review papers. Asking questions and doing research was a big part of what we did in class. In class I spent my time trying to to gather and organize my information, making an outline, so that it would be easier for me to write my review for the rough draft. I found that once I re-read about the criteria that I chose to use and then relating it to my subject and deciding how my audience would react to it, all my thoughts and ideas started to flow more swiftly. I found very east to put myself in the position of my potential audience and try to view things from what the audience would expect to get out of their experience using the website.

     Last Friday, I did not come to class with a clear idea of what I wanted the subject of my webtext article to be. I was confused when trying to find a topic that would relate my webtext review to my final project. There are many things that I like and some hobbies that I have, but I did not feel that any of those things met the requirements or were up to the standards of this assignment. They were mostly popular culture ideas and would not be beneficial to me when dealing with the content of my final project. So I left class still in a rut, pondering my options.

     On Monday, I was in much of the same predicament as when I left class on Friday. I was still without direction. I found it difficult to even right a couple of sufficient ideas when we were asked to write our thoughts so far on a piece of paper. Then, even as some examples were read aloud in class, I was still struggling to find a topic that I had enough interest in, while meeting the standards of the assignment. I had hit a wall in my head and it was becoming very difficult to get past it. I tend to over think assignments and make them bigger than they are, so it is often frustrating when I find myself in these seemingly “deja-vu” predicaments that I’ve come to know. Then when I met with you one-on-one and we started to talk about my options and interests the wall started to slowly break down and I began to search the Bowling Green website for the organization on campus that I recently joined. The webpage for the organization, was to my surprise, barely a webpage and more of like a slideshow posing as a webpage. When we found this to be a good option for me that would work for my webtext review and my final project, it was a big relief and I began to feel more confident with the assignment.

      I submitted my topic on Wed. before class feeling confident in my topic of reviewing the IPCO website and also using it as the subject of my final project. Then in class I started going through the three articles from last week and started highlighting the cirteria that I thought I would like to use in my webtext review assignment.

     This week we had three readings: “The 7 C’s of Web Service Design, The 7 C’s of Interactive Design” and “How C.R.A.P” is your site design. These three readings helped give me insight into the critera I should be using when I am designing my website. I think these articles are very helpful and will be necessary to refer to as I go through the process of designing my website. It will be beneficial to use these readings because it will help me understand how to make a better website that is not necessarily just “cool” but has all the elements that will make it appealing to my audience.

     I thought it was very beneficial when we analyzed the BGSU website in class on Wed. following the criteria from the “…Interactive Design” article. It made it a lot easier to show me how to think crtically when actually applying these criteria to a website that we are all familiar with. It was also interesting to see how we as students thought about the usefulness of the website and how it was percieved by us.

     Today we had a substitute teacher who taught us about the importance of alignment. We learned the differences between left alignment, right alignment and center alignment and how they can visually draw your eyes to certain things and the importance of where you want to be looking. We also looked at how colors can affect the way we look at things, how cool colors often have less emphasis placed on them than warm colors. Then we talked about proximity and how relationships of objects are built based on spacing.

     This week in class we focused a lot on perception an how it can change the way we look at things. We talk about different concepts like audience and framing and text and purpose and how these can be important when we are looking at visual images.

     Audience is important when looking at visual images because figuring out who the audience is can help you better figure out to whom the message from the image is being conveyed. We looked at a black and white photo vs. the image again with color to see how that might change the audience. Framing is also important because it can be divided up into different ways and depending on the way the image is framed you can see the specific purpose that the image is offering. One way that we saw framing in the images was through lighting.

     When talking about images with text, we talked about what the text was trying to accomplish; why was text used at all? We talked about a sentence of text vs. a few words and how that affected our perception of the image.

      For our assignment at the end of the week we looked at a picture from Dan Eldon and tried to analyze all the different aspects of the collage to figure out the message of it when you looked at the collage with all the different elements.

      I really enjoyed the analytical aspect of class this week and the critical thinking that came with looking at all the different aspects of audience,framing,text and purpose