Website

Here is my final project for my Digital Communications class. For this project I made a website that has

• An About Me Section
• Digital Resume
• Print Resume
• Digital Portfolio
• Photography Portfolio
• Writing Portfolio
• Contact Form

Click on the screenshot below to visit my site. Enjoy!

Website Brainstorm

My goal in creating a website is to allow potential employers to get to know me better through a digital portfolio. I am interested in getting future internships and ultimately a job in the social media sector of public relations, so it is important that I create a website to show my online presence. I will do this by including diverse content such as:

• About Me Section
• Resume (both digital and printed format)
• Digital Portfolio
• Including my blog, podcast, and video project for this class
• Photography Portfolio
• Social Media Widgets, specifically LinkedIn since it related to work
• Contact Form

These features will allow visitors to my site to understand what I am interested in, by reading my home page's "about me" section. I believe this is critical to have on a website because it allows the user to get a feel for my background and interests in terms of future employment opportunities. By providing my resume on my website, users will be able to view my experiences instantly. This is an important document to have on a work website because it allows for the opportunity of employers to contact you if they find your experience interesting and valuable to their company. It opens doors to future employment opportunities that I may have otherwise been unfamiliar with. I mention including a LinkedIn widget on the website because I think it's important that users are able to view my professional profile on a popular social media that was made particularly for the working world. Lastly, a contact form will allow for users to easily contact me if they are interested in getting further information about me/interested in employing me.

I have looked at a few website building platforms and like the format and services that Wix provides. Below are five website design inspirations.

1. Jessie Sima's use of social media widgets. Keeping the widget's traditional format. Since I want my website to be minimalistic and simple I will probably only put the widgets on the contact page. Already I feel like Jessie's homepage is dominated by the widgets because their color don't go along with her theme. When there's only one image on the screen I feel like there doesn't need to be widgets included.

2. Kate England's name on all of the pages. Would like to have a unique font. I want my font throughout the website to be fun, yet still professional looking - I think this aspect will add some personality to a minimalistic design.

3. Ben Hulse's minimalistic design is something I admire. I want my website to have a white background and one main accent color (probably sea foam, since that's my favorite color). I like the idea of my home page having my name, the navigation bar, and a large photograph. Simple and clean.

4. Rich McNabb's layout/use of navigation. I don't want my home page to look like this but I'd like to have a page that resembles this format where there are photographs that lead the user to another page. My idea in incorporating this into my website is to have a "Portfolio" page which will consist of photographs - clicking on a photograph will lead the user to the designated location, for example a digital portfolio page or a photography portfolio page. This idea would also be useful on my photography portfolio page because it could display one photograph from an album, and clicking on that photograph would lead to another page with the entire album.

5. Pablo Vivanco's Portfolio layout - laid out one at a time, vertically. Allows the project to have it's own space, in order for it to be recognized fully. Important not to crowd the page for the digital portfolio because unlike the photography portfolio, there are descriptions that will go along with my projects.

ASOS: Audience & Home Pages

Focus: your audience. It's important to find out what your audience needs in order to write your content in a way that they'll be able to use it.

7 Steps to Understanding Your Audience

1. List your major audiences: ask yourself how people identify themselves with regard to your web content.
2. Gather information about your audiences: need to understand who they are, why they come, what they need, and how to write web content for them.
3. List major characteristics for each audience: key phrases, experience, emotions, values, technology, demographics, and social and cultural environments are all important categories.
4. Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stories: gather this information and answer it in their vocabulary, so they can utilize it.
5. Use your information to create personas: create a composite of the characteristics multiple website visitors.
6. Include the persona's goals and tasks
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site: these give users a good sense of the people visiting your website, as well as how they use your website.

Home Pages

You set the tone of a website with it's home page. Personality is important to incorporate on the home page in order to keep visitors interested in the site itself. There are 5 major functions of home pages:

1. Identifying the site, establishing the brand
2. Setting the tone and personality of the site
3. Helping people get a sense of what the site is all about
4. Letting people start key tasks immediately
5. Sending each person on the right way, effectively and efficiently

While reading 'Writing Web Content that Works,' by Janice Redish, I couldn't help but think about one website that I had recently visited that was successful in covering the critical points that the chapter listed, for identifying with your audience as well as functions of the home page.

ASOS is a website that sells fashion goods to both men and women ages 18-34. This information is clearly stated in it's description on multiple search engines (the image provided above is from Google's web search. While there is not necessarily a persona created for this website, ASOS has over 40,000 styles to shop, which allows online shoppers to create a very diverse wardrobe. 

The home page on ASOS's website allows users to shop conveniently by selecting their gender and then more specifically, the article of clothing that they wish to shop for. After selecting which clothing article they wish to shop for, the user can even further refine their search to match their specific size, desired color, price, and brand.

   

My shopping experience with ASOS was easy and efficient with the help of their refined search tool. It's a website that understands that people who shop online don't want to spend hours searching for an item. This is a website that has definitely thought about its users' goals, since it has resources that allow the users to shop quickly and hassle-free.

User Experience: French Press or Espresso Machine?

Why drop  $1,199.69 on a Breville Dual Boiler Semi Automatic Espresso Machine when you could just buy a simple Bodum Chambord 8 cup French Press for $39.99? The french press is over a thousand dollars cheaper than the espresso machine and has a higher user review. It goes to show that the more expensive, more complex products aren't the ones that always deliver the best user experience.

User experience: the experience the product creates for the people who use it in the real world.

More and more businesses have now come to recognize that providing a quality user experience is an essential, sustainable competitive advantage for all kinds of products and services. If your users have a bad experience they won't comeback. If they have an OK experience with your product, but a better experience with your competitor site, they'll go back to the competitor, not yours. So how do you create a good user experience?

From product design to user experience design

• When people think about product design they often think of it in terms of aesthetic appeal: a well designed product is one that looks good to the eye and feels good to the touch.
• Functionality terms: a well designed product is one that does what it promises to do. 

The french press coffee maker pictured above shows a simple product that is a functioning product that is also aesthetically appealing. These steps to using this product are depicted through the four images. 

The more complex a product is, the more difficult it becomes to identify exactly how to deliver a successful experience o the user. Each additional feature, function, or step in the process of using a product creates another opportunity for the experience to fall short.

Any user experience effort aims to improve efficiency. This comes in two forms:

1. Helping people work faster
2. Helping people make fewer mistakes

There is less tendency for errors to occur when a product is simple and designed to work quickly and efficiently. The french press coffee maker allows the user to make coffee exactly as they please (for example, using any type of coffee grounds and deciding their coffee:water ratio). Coffee is usually made in the morning before people rush out the door. Who wants to start off their morning stressed out because they couldn't get their daily cup of joe? No one. So ditch the complex technology that's associate with most coffee machines, and switch over to the french press in order to create your perfect cup of coffee with ease.

Minding Your Users

Take the user into account every step of the way as you develop your product. There are many different kinds of coffee drinkers. (Here's an interesting article about 29 Types of Coffee Drinkers, just for your entertainment.) It must be taken into account when designing a coffee machine that not all people drink their coffee the same way.

The biggest reason user experience should matter to you is that it matters to your users. The french press allows the user to take control and make their own cup of coffee exactly how they want to make it. This product simply provides the user with the equipment necessary to make their perfect cup of coffee. All the ingredients (coffee grounds, water, sugar, milk, cream, etc.) that are added to the coffee are dependent on the person who will be drinking the coffee, not the coffee machine.

The Five Planes

The user experience design process is all about ensuring that no aspect of the user's experience with your product happens without your conscious, explicit intent. This means taking into account every possibility of every action the user is likely to take and understanding the user's expectations at every step of the way through that process. These five place provide a conceptual framework for talking about user experience problems and the tools we use to solve them. 

1. Surface Plane: on the surface the user sees a series of web pages, made up of images and text.
2. Skeleton Plane: the placement of buttons, controls, photos, and blocks of text.
3. Structure Plane: defines how users got to that page and where they could go when they were finished there.
4. Scope Plane: defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together.
5. Strategy Plane: incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out but what the users want to get out of the site as well.

On the lowest plane, we aren't concerned about the final shape of the product. On the highest place, we are only concerned with the most concrete details of the appearance of the product. Plane by plane, the decisions we have to make become a little more specific and involve finer levels of detail.

Going Green While Staying Lean Video

Here is my video about sustainable fitness at Furman University!

Getting It Right: Online Editing and Publishing

In Carroll's chapter, “Getting It Right: Online Editing, Designing and Publishing," the fundamentals of online editing and publishing are outlined. He presents a step-by-step process. This process is critical in order to understand how to properly formulate your own online content.

1. Identify reader and audience and purpose of content: It is important to consider the readers’ needs such as their browsers, connection speeds, hardware/software, etc.
2. Define document structure and links: All pages should be able to stand to operate independently. The site should be easy to navigate - links within text but also to other pages on the site
3. Define the Style: A consistent presentation/style should be presented for all pages
4. Edit/CopyEdit: Reviewing and editing content for consistency of all elements should start when the site is created and continue throughout the entire building process.
5. Write Headlines: Written in a direct style since readers don't always have background information to interpret a headline’s meaning
6. Test Usability: Test the tasks that readers will want to perform on the website since this is the main reason you are creating the website.

I have never created an independent website, however I have worked with multiple blogs that I have customized. My most successful blog website was one that was hosted on Blogger. The purpose of this blog was to document my journey throughout Tanzania, East Africa on my May Experience last summer. I didn't realize it at the time, and really had no experience in how to maintain a blog website, but I followed Carroll's step-by-step process to some extent.

I made my blog public so that anyone with Internet access was free to view it. I knew that my family members, professors, and friends were reading my blog posts, so I made sure that I was putting out information that would be acceptable to all of these groups of people. I had a specific layout for my blog, and made sure that the post pages were in the same theme as the homepage. All of my blog posts contained information about my daily experiences, and could be considered a dairy style blog. My trip to Tanzania is over, but I still periodically check up on the blog to make sure that the links are working. Even though I'm not actively updating my blog, it is still on the Internet, so people are still viewing it.

Modern Family Modernizing TV's Traditional Point of Views

There are 3 conceptualizations of point of view that are described in Douglass and Harnden's chapter titled, "Point of View"...

1. Camera shot
• 1st person POV shot: camera as character's eyes
• 3rd person POV shot: most common camera position; camera neutral
2. Perspective of storyteller (person)
• 1st person POV: direct narrative from storyteller which allows for commentary and eyewitness perspective.
• 2nd person POV: directly addresses the "you" as the viewer
• 3rd person POV: the audience are seen as "distant" observers and are therefore more detached in this point of view.
• This POV is the most commonly used method
3. Character Point of View: the interests, attitudes, and beliefs associated with a character's or group's perspective are shared in this point of view.

Modern Family is a television series aired on ABC that utilizes diverse point of view shots and perspectives. This is one many newer television shows that use all 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person point of views. An example of another television series that practices these techniques is The Office.

The majority of Modern family is shot through 3rd person point of view, in terms of camera shot as well as perspective of the storyteller. This is the most common point of view used in most films and television programs. But the addition of the 2nd and 3rd person points of view add a more informal tone to the program. These points of views take place when the character is talking to the camera as if they are on a reality television show.

The audience is able to connect more to the characters in the show when 2nd and 3rd person point of view is used. I suppose this is why they call it modern family, since the characters are trying to relate to modern day people, by using first and second point of view.