Notes on Building a Web Culture (Style Design Standards)

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For some reason, I am writing about things in reverse order for this unit.

1st, Animoto or Timeline 3D. Well, I wasn't sure where to put these in the course. Normally, I would talk about Timeline 3D with the other timeline materials, but since it is a pay-to-use product, I wanted to mention now that I really prefer to use free tools and apps. I realize that you can't always do that, but I've really got to be convinced that the tool is a great tool before I will pay to use a tool (unless someone is giving me the money to purchase the app). Timeline 3d looks very good, but the other timeline tools are free.

Let me also put out a very important warning. The danger of committing to using a tool (free or paid) on the web is that at some point in time the tool and all of your work will disappear. You've always got to consider that because the reality is that things do disappear. That's one of the reasons I committed to working with code to develop my owntimeline rather than using a web-based tool. I also had a bit more control over style issues with my own coding--and this unit is all about style, isn't it? Anyway, if you do use some web tool, either make sure that there is a way to back it up, or save as much of the content as you can in some kind of backup form. Most of the free website builders, like Weebly, do NOT provide an easy way to back up your work.

In regard to Animoto, which looks like a very interesting, slick, web tool for real estate agents, I was also not sure where to cover it in this course. But, at this time, I'd like to note that it is important to be able to work with digital video. You will almost always run into some project that can benefit from some video, and this (Animoto) looks like an easy way to work with video. You should take the time to tinker with some of the video software on your computer; that software will differ depending if you are using a Mac or PC, tablet or laptop.

2nd, Now considering your project for the course, there are many possible tools that you might end up using (and that we will be covering in the courses). Specifically, with respect to putting material on the web, there are now many options for building a website.

It's also getting pretty complicated in the web design world with a lot of new tools available to designers; most of these tools are extremely complicated. Still, take a look!

I have not used Weebly, which looks pretty, but I have used Webnode to create a simple website for our summer swim team. Blogs, which we examined in unit 3, are also an attractive option.

Look at the results of Google searches for free website builders and free website hosting. There are just so many options available now. To put content on the web, you really no longer have to learn how to code HTML, or even how to use Dreamweaver, which has become a very complicated web design program (but it does have great templates).

Depending, on what you end up doing, you might need a place to host your digital project--this is especially true if you want to have your own web URL. I use inmotion.com, but there are many others available with all kinds of different pricing options.

Style Considerations

At last, a few brief notes here on web style considerations when it comes to creating web-based materials. This is only slightly touched on by Rosenzweig, and I will talk more about this in my video, so just a few points here.

  1. KISS (keep it simple stupid). There is no single, better piece of advice for almost any kind of online project. You might argue that a better acronym is KISP (keep it as simple as possible), but that is harder to remember.
  2. When it come to the appearance of material on the web, space is better than cramped clutter. The Google search page is a good example of "space." Almost every home page on the web, Yahoo, USA Today, AOL, ESPN, is a good example of the problems that you get when you try to cram too much information and advertising onto a single page (and I am not even raising the problems that arise if someone is on a slow Internet connection and trying to connect to these sites).
  3. There are a lot of different views on web style; these are my views.
  4. This isn't really style per se, but it is something that Rosenzweig raises: how to match appropriate and properly scaled technologies to your particular project. In other words, "The technology used to produce a website should be appropriate for the website's content and purpose." This may seem an obvious point, but new website creators often try to use too much technology for a project, or too little. For example, an archive of 20,000 documents, such as the New Deal Network, could consist of 20,000 individually coded web pages, but that would be an enormous amount of work. It is far better for the site to be based on a small computer program (database software) that creates those 20,000 pages automatically from a database.
  5. Also, as Rosenzweig notes, "Newcomers to the web (as well as many old-timers) are often tempted to focus, sometimes obsessively, on the technology. After all, technology is what most obviously distinguishes the web from our former primary realm of expression—paper—and despite our best efforts, we could not get through even the introduction to this chapter without delving into several technical computer terms. " This gets us back to KISS. The key really isn't the technology; it is content. If you don't have content, then there is no reason to have a website, and you don't need technology either. Seems rather obvious, but it isn't to many people.
  6. Change is real when it comes to style issues and web technology.

Other things that are a bit more complicated

ADA Compliance

That's very important for website design, and there are some online tools to help.

Difference between a web designer and a web developer

In case you might be wondering, because, in my mind, the boundary is often blurred, my colleague Professor Gage, explained.

Web Designer

Web Developer

Good design or bad design

Some more links