Josh Moncrieff

Foreword

Going into this class I had one goal – Learn how to create a basic website and discover what technologies/coding languages I’ll need to learn in order to make a good website. Well, I’m confident that that’s exactly what I’ve learnt, but I also discovered so much more…

First off, I took this class on a bit of a whim. I’m about to graduate, and up until this point I had almost no idea what I might want to do after school. Sure, I’ve been throwing around the possibility of going to law school, and I’m confident I’d do very well in that field, but as my side hobby/passion of design and digital development became more and more serious, I started to doubt whether Law was something that’d be able to hold my interest in the long run. So I took this course, and I’m so glad that I did

My approach to things that I’m interested borderlines on obsession. I’ve hated school for as long as I can remember because of the snail-pace things seem to be taught. So, the second week of this semester I sought a book recommendation for learning HTML/CSS at my pace, and then I I looked for more books, and more, and more… But something I hadn’t anticipated was just how dynamic web development is. It seems that once one gets past the basics there’s a thousand and one ways to do that same thing, all with different experts proclaiming their method to be the best.

This is where I found the true value in this course. Mr Hoyt’s direction toward industry leaders through our weekly assignments and quizzes has really helped me to sort the great from the good. Further, I’m now discovering just how much there is to web development, which is daunting but also inspiring.

Before this course I knew nothing about programming. NOTHING! Now I’m actively scanning the source code of sites because their solutions to web design problems are more interesting than their websites themselves. I also find myself cringing at the thought of WYSIWYG website generator programs like iWeb. I could go on and on, but I guess I should get to the actual course review…

Class Format

I enjoyed the class discussion-based format. Personally, I’ve always found that a decent discussion with a group that has come prepared to talk beyond the required material far more beneficial than passive lectures. At times the nature of the content was a little slow (perhaps because I was pursuing the content independently much further than was required), but even then there were always interesting examples or references to resources that proved extremely useful (I don’t think I’ll ever forget Mr Web King!)

Change of Perspective

The material really lured me in directions I probably otherwise mightn’t have discovered. Especially the parts concerning social media as a means of keeping track of industry direction and changes. Likewise, the material over search engine spiders and what they can and cannot read really opened my eyes to the importance of good semantic markup. Now it’s a kick to find a site that’s both incredibly beautiful aesthetically, dynamic AND incredibly accessible.

Getting More Out of Class

This is a tough one… I got a huge amount out of this course, but I feel that much of that may have been because I was personally driven to do so. The class worked well for me from a learning perspective (although my grade probably suggests otherwise ), but apparently it didn’t work for others… I’ve never been in a class with such a high value that also had such a surprisingly low consistent level of attendance. I’m not sure why that is, because I certainly don’t feel that it’s at all indicative of the quality of the course.

WordPress…

The more I learn about writing my own source code, the more I find myself hating WordPress. I mean, I understand its appeal to those who don’t have the time or know-how to create their own site, but I found it to be incredibly limiting. Often I’d find a widget or a piece of functionality that I liked the idea of, but couldn’t tweak to fit my needs. WordPress, to me, feels like it promises a lot to the end user, but at the cost of flexibility. That being said however, I was very happy to learn that it’s just a PHP framework, so I look forward to hacking the pieces I like away from all of the excess that I don’t .

Least Interesting Topics

It’s odd. I can’t think of anything notable that I didn’t find at least moderately interesting. Certainly nothing I felt could put me to sleep (even if I was a little hung over one day ). Actually, I can say that I found Paul Boag to be more than a little frustrating to listen to at times, and I also found some of the quiz questions to be a little ambiguous, but that’s about it.

I did like the textbook, even if it was a tad dated in parts. If I were going to replace it, or at the very least supplement it, I’d seriously consider Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” or one of SitePoint’s html/css intro books like “Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS”.

Anyway, I’d better stop here. Hope these comments are helpful!

I have indeed put everything together, everything’s running smoothly, and the website is live and functional!

String Master

Where to start. There were so many good presentations that it’s hard for me to pick out just three, but I must, so here goes…

Re-Orientation.ericdabala.com

First off, let me just say wow. What a concept! This is one of those ideas that has me thinking “Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?”. I know that this response is supposed to be more geared toward the website itself, but it’s the idea behind the website that makes me want to keep an eye on the development here.

I especially like that Eric intends to turn this into a mobile app. I can see a lot of potential in this one, especially for user-generated content. It’s almost like reinventing the campus map but for all of the students that actually know their way around campus. Kinda like making an unnecessary tool useful again!

As for the website. It looks very slick. I’d imagine that as this idea grows, the website’s going to become a lot more complicated and therefore probably not going to be able to sustain the blog-style layout that it currently sports, but hey, I think that’s a good problem to have! I also really like the logo/icon. From a design perspective it really looks like you’ve distilled the underlying philosophy of your technology (at least, as far as I understand it) down to something simple, recognizable, and relevant. Great stuff!

RenewedServicesInc.com

Debbi’s site is very clean and concise. It sets out to serve a purpose and I think it hits it’s mark quite efficiently. The biggest take-home message I got from Debbi’s site was how important and helpful having a good understanding of your target audience is. It looks as though this site has been tailored specifically to the people it serves, and sports a design/feel that creates a positive atmosphere for visitors. This, it think, is especially important when the service you’re offering has the potential to highlight difficulties in a clients life, and the friendly faces and natural-tone color scheme works well to welcome and celebrate the families of the people this service is for.

MiCocinaPeru.com

Corlos’ site is a good example of how less can be more. The clean design conjures images of new table cloths and pristine silverware. It’s the no-gimmick feel that gives the content that much more of a professional touch. it’s also what highlights the colors of the photographic content, which might otherwise convey less of the geographical context of the cuisine on display if it had been buried in a sea of competing hues. This is also a big factor on the individual recipe pages. It’s often very hard to make a photograph of food look appealing, and surrounding colors can change a viewers perception of a dish from appealing to disgusting almost subconsciously through color context alone, and as the site stands, I’d challenge anyone to state with confidence that Huevo Chimbo doesn’t look cruelly delicious!

Site Objectives:
Unfortunately, my site objectives were not met for my intended project site. The more I learnt about javaScript and implementing interactivity, the more I came to realize just how much learning would be required to achieve my desired effects. That being said, I have learnt a great deal about the subject matter that I set out to, which is something that will forever help me with web design in the future.

For the site that I’m going to be presenting, I’m happy to say that most of my site objectives were met. The site is small, very easy to navigate, has all of the elements I thought were needed, and links to the relevant product being advertised.

Intended Audience:
As stated above, my initial site did not meet expectations.

My StringMaster site, I feel, caters well to the target audience. The site is short, simple, informative, and to the point.

Design Appeal:
One major design element that I have implemented into the StringMaster site is dimensions appropriate for display on the Apple iPad. That, plus the use of iPad-compatible web technologies such as javaScript, work to ensure that the site meets the expectations of the target audience.

Influential Topics from Class:
Of all the things presented in the material over the semester for this course, the information on Web Standards, Usability, and Accessibility really struck a chord (StringMaster pun absolutely intended ) with me. I had not realized the amount of effort that often goes (and sometimes doesn’t go) into ensuring that a website meets standards to ensure functionality and compatibility across a wide range of browsers and technology variations. Further, the material about usability has spurred my desire to continue to learn and apply my academic focus in psychology toward what I believe is an area that has thus far been neglected in the rapid development of the World Wide Web.

Quick disclaimer; this is more a revision of Step #4 than a declaration of completion.

So there is a TON of stuff out there about web interaction. I’m sure that’s not a huge surprise to anyone. However, in doing the research for this project, something that’s surprised me quite a bit has been the separation, or lack thereof, between academic research and design consultation companies. It’s almost as though design firms have cornered large parts of research fields pertaining to design and aesthetics. So instead of finding some of the really interesting aesthetic studies in publicly available journal articles, gaining access to a huge chunk of this research requires subscriptions to privately owned publications (and let me tell you, they’re certainly confident about how much they believe their research to be worth!).

That being said, there is still a whole lot of interesting stuff available through academic channels. Interestingly, a lot of my research pertaining to text readability and digital font optimization has actually come from business journals in Japan. the Japanese tech industry has published quiet a bit about how best to meet the limitations of digital displays, particularly with regards to emerging mobile technologies. For example, text readability is closely correlated with background/text contrast, which I have learnt is quite a big issue for digital content because backlighting can dramatically reduce black-on-white contrast.

Another interesting nugget I’ve discovered is that the perceived passage of time (i.e., during a load screen) can be altered subject to the choice of background/splash page color. I won’t tell you which colors do what though, you’ll have to wait for my project site to come online .

Anyway, as mentioned above, my progress from a ‘step #’ perspective isn’t very easy to gauge. The content side is coming along well, and I expect to have all of my publishable copy by the end of this week. The code side of things is a little harder to judge. I’m currently experimenting with a few different ways of getting certain elements to behave just right. Who would have thought that making a website focused on usability and simplicity would be so complicated!

Josh Moncrieff.

I’ve been playing around with the mock-up for my site design quite a bit. As it turns out, for one of my functions I’m going to have three sets of CSS declarations. I’ve decided that tackling interactivity for every concept I have intended to showcase is going to take a lot more time than I think I’ll have available, so instead I’m only gong to be incorporating my two primary usability concepts (readability and user-specified brightness). I know it’s a bit of a cop-out, but getting the javaScript to a point where I understand everything I’m incorporating, rather than just copying and pasting, is proving to be quite the challenge (a welcome challenge mind you, just not for this project).

Just to clarify, the functionality that I’ll be focusing on actually implementing is a dynamic color scheme that allows a user to choose from one of three combinations designed specifically for varying levels of ambient light. i.e., Bright white background for high light, gray tones for general light, and light text on a dark background for very low light levels. By doing this, I hope to give viewers a chance to give their eyes a rest, whilst maintaining primary control over the appearance of my sight (as opposed to a user simply raising or lowering the brightness of their screen).

I’ll also be working in an option that allows the user to pick from a small selection of different fonts. I’m hoping to incorporate google-fonts so that the font selection I specify will be available to users irrespective of whether their computer does not already have it.

As of right now, the designs are not on my server because they only currently exist as InDesign layouts. Check back soon for an updated version!

Here it is, my newly revised version of the same site we’ve all come to know and love.

Prometheus!

I had played around with the though of incorporating a little bit of AJAX into the mix, but that may have defeated the purpose of having PHP on such a small site structure.

Thinking back to my personas, I’m not really sure exactly what reaction I’d like them to have. My intention is to employ color, movement, and font selection for very specific purposes, but I aim for those purposes to yield unconscious results. For example, believe it or not but the more difficult a piece of text is to read, the more likely the reader is to retain its content, at least to a point…

But in a digital environment people aren’t necessarily going to be willing to read anything that isn’t comfortable to look at, so I’m developing some ideas concerning comfort. The idea I’m most fond of at the moment is the use of a splash screen on the main page that displays three very simple icons representing different light levels (moon/stars, sunrise, midday-sun). Each icon, when selected, will trigger a different stylesheet specifically tailored to those light conditions. I don’t know about you, but I find there’s nothing more obnoxious than being greeted with a wall of white in the early hours of the morning.

I’ve also given some thought to the use of color. I’m working on a way of color coding site navigation in such a way that the user will know where they are in the site in relation to other content. I’m still not sure this is a particularly viable alternative to current methods of site location notification, but I feel the current methods are a bit too learned-through-use rather than natural. We’ll see…

Using movement is going to be tricky. I don’t want to be too heavy on the use of javascript if I can avoided it, and I certainly want to avoid scripting any content. So movement is likely going to be constrained to drawing attention to specific areas of interest external to textual content (whatever they may be).

For this post I’m going to be focusing on a pet peeve of mine, bad copy editing.
I hate bad copy editing. I can’t stand it. Nothing turns me off of a website ,or a half-decent book for that matter, than misspelt words, incorrect grammar usage, and my all-time favorite, repeated or missing words!
I find them everywhere; on news sites, retail sites, even author autobiographies. Now, I’m not going to get on a high horse and say that the internet is ruining the English language (I think America has done a fine job of that already, ho ho ho… I kid), but I think it’s vitally important, especially in an environment as interactive and accessible as the web, to say what you really mean, rather than what gets the information out the fastest.
I know that this post should probably be more focused on the design aspect of websites, but what good is the sexiest design in the world if a user can’t be confident that you’ve at least read what you’ve posted…

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents. Here’s some totally unrelated information about my home computer for the sake of meeting the requirements of this assignment:
Display Resolution: 2560 x 1440 (the iMac 27″ is a sexy beast indeed)
Color Display: 32-bit (Does anyone actually work in 32-bit color mode when using Adobe Photoshop?)
Graphics Card: AMD Radeon HD 6970M (Purrs like a kitten. Perhaps I should stop feeding it tuna…)

Also, as a side note, my experience in writing for the web has come primarily from writing for the school newspaper and creating advertisements for clients. Articles written for print usually get the benefit of being checked over by a senior editor before production, but you’d be amazed at how many typos get through to both print and digital ad content.

I opted to do an external style sheet, so instead of uploading the file I’ve hosted it on my webfactional domain.

Here is the updated prometheus page.

To view the changes I’ve made simply use one of the inbuilt/downloaded developer tools in your browser.