Effective Mediums for Participatory Culture

I am really starting to feel like a lot of new terms I am learning for my new media class have the same meaning. After a while i felt like every word that we learned had to do with how a computer-user uses a website.

After reading Craig Bellamy’s blog, I got a bit more confused because the words he defines are all conglomerates of different words put together to have a multiple-use meaning. For example Transmedia navigation. You would think it would it meant how to search and use a website, but it means the ability to follow the flow of stories over a multitude of different news convergences.

After last weeks blog, when we were asked to define the three things needed to make a good website, this weeks reading an information take our explanations a little bit deeper.

This week, we aren’t just looking at one website, but how a user controls multiple websites. I liked the quote used from one of our readings: ” All the water-cooler speculation moved on-line” There are tons of websites with nothing but chit-chat, gossip and rumors, and it is up to the user how he/she interprets the numerous sites information.

The term participatory culture, is effectively just that. a culture in which you participate in. It is how the user participates in the on-line culture of sending information across the entire Internet. Participatory culture doesn’t just fall on the shoulders of the website.  The user has to be capable of maneuvering throughout different sites using the tools a programs accessible to gain the best possibly grasp on the information that is provided.

One of the easiest websites to use as an example for a effective medium of participatory culture is wikipedia.com. I know I keep bringing up wikipedia.com, and many college professors don’t like it as an accurate source for information, but I think that it has become, over time, and as it expanded, into the ultimate “on-line water-cooler”.

At first wikipedia.com was your typical on-line encyclopedia, but after time, more random people started to post their views on different topics, and after a while, it became a hotbed of citizen-encyclopedic information. If a person has information on an obscure topic, they can post it on wikipedia.com and it will become the main information for that topic.

The problem with wikipedia is that it is misleading. If you go there top find in depth info for a research paper, you might find info you need,, but the info is most likely not written by an accredited source. How does one know if what the author  has wrote is 100% accurate or if it is just their point of view.

I don’t think wikipedia encompasses all of participatory culture, but it is a super-sized forum of endless information provided by millions of different authors. Isn’t that what participation is?

Making A Site Look Good

One of the most important things about a website is how it looks. The colors, the layout, the sidebars, everything visually appealing to the viewers eye. If your website isn’t appealing, or if it is under-developed, users will be frustrated just looking through the site, and will probably look elsewhere.

One site that I access multiple times every-day is ESPN.com. I continue to go to ESPN.com for all my sports needs because, not only do I know that they will have all the information that I need, but visually, the site is appealing, and it is full of tools and applications that make viewing the site easier and better.

The site is layed out in a two color color-scheme of black and red. ESPN usesblack and red as their “trademark” colors. They use black and red on their virtual sets for TV broadcast, and for the bottom line they run on TV. for a while ESPN changed their colors allot, but for the last couple of years, they stuck with black and red, so the colors would become identifiable with their product.

ESPN.com not only has a good color layout, but their man page is layout like a magazine front page. A main article with a large picture, sidebars on the top side of the screen, and as you scroll/scan down the page, polls, captions, and links to other pages and tools appear, just like magazines hint to articles in other sections and what not.

Another site that I use allot, which is a complete contrast to ESPN.com is laxpower.com, which is a up-to-date, complete database and news source for everything involiving high school and college lacrosse. As a former “elite” HS lacrosse player, I would go here everyday to check the stats that the site keeps on every team in every league and state. I played college lacrosse for two years and would use the site all the time to see national rankings, forum posts from other lacrosse players, and just about any other piece of info about the current lacrosse world.

Although I visit laxpower.com all the time, I do so mainly just because of its content. I have had to ignore the fact that the site is visually unappealing. The site doesn’t look like its design has been updated in 5 to 10 years.

The site’s main colors are grey and green, but there is not allot of green on the pages. the sidebars are also grey and have black color font which is not appealing to the eyes. All the links are typical-blue, and the site doesn’t use allot of tables or boxes to organize its info on the main page.

When you get into the site deeper (all the statistic pages) it looks like your just looking at a basic stat sheet, with old-style typewriter font.

Check out these two links. The first being a standings of every team in Division 3 lacrosse. it is tough to read and not appealing. Now go to this ESPN.com site for standings for mens basketball. The way ESPN lays their information out is less stressful on the eyes of the viewer.

The third website I will discuss in called TheDCscene.com. This is the website that I worked for this summer, and is run by NBC universal. It is a younger website with less people working on the design and less overall funding. It starts out with a black welcome screen, that makes you click to enter. it has pictures of things and DC and casts a good image of what the site might contain.

The main page is really nicely laid out with 8 different tables for each section that the site covers. with in each table is a picture of the main article, then a list of five links about other current articles in that subject. The site is loaded with pictures and color because the site is designed for people ages 21-30, so the site needs to look fresh. The problem I have with this site, is that since it is owned and managed by NBC universal/ NBC4 in Washington DC, the sidebars are peppered with buttons going to places unassociated with the DCscene. It might make overall searching better, but who goes to a entertainment guide, then clicks to go to a place about home & garden?

On the other sidebar of the screen, the page is loaded with ads for different products, always blinking and moving. I feel like that brings down the class of the site, but at the same time, ads help pay for the production of a site.

Overall, I think that site design and visual appearance is almost key in creating a site. As I explained, a site doesn’t have to look amazing if it is certain that the info it has is deep enough and important enough to viewers that their appearance wont scare them off .(Laxpower.com)

Top 3 Necessary Considerations When Making/Designing and Website

Websites are now the store-fronts of the new generation. The way it looks and runs impacts how many customers it interacts with on the page. Even before being asked this question, I do believe that I still would have been able to break up information into about 3 categories when discussing how to design a website. It really comes down to the looks, content, and use of the website.

When you browse the Internet for anything, weather it be for new, sports, or shopping, the sites that can attract the users eyes are the most affective. Webdesign from scratch.com had good information on making sites appealing to “browse”. Users don’t want to read through lines and lines of text when looking for their information. They want it in bullet forms and easier to quickly scan down the page. Using colors, and different boxes(really, the whole layout and design for the site), your site needs to look attractive, because a site could have all the information in the world, but if it cant sell it well with the sites looks, many people will fly right over it.

The second aspect of that needs to be covered when designing a proper website is that it needs to be use-able. Because of new Internet technology and computer tools, so much more can be done on a website that just click links and download music. You can watch videos, play games, edit music tracks, use graphs, just tons of stuff that keep the user busy within your site. The information from a podcast I listened to (Note: Podcast- I should have mentioned this in my previous sentence), had tons of info on ways to sell your site. It was from Clearcastdigital media. One of the main reasons that I consistently go to espn.com for ALL of my sports news, is because their site is so deep with interactive features with-in all the content makers for a extremely well rounded site. I can watch video highlight and news packages on my favorite basketball teams game, and I can see stat graphs tracking the progress of a games score that’s not being aired on TV. Tools are so important because the more time a user spends on your site, the more the user can trust and rely on the site to always be there when the user needs information.

 The third and final piece of of a design for website is content. . If the tool and features of a site are considered the “guts/organs” of a website, the content is definitely the”meat/muscle”. When a user gets past the design and looks of the site, and really digs within the site for info they want, the more links, new stories, posting, basically words, there are, the more the user will want to come back with just the slightest bit of hesitation. A real life example of this has to be The InternetMovieDatabase, otherwise known as IMDB.com. Any time I have just the slightest bit of question or concern about “wasn’t she that girl from some movie?”, or basically any sort of movie/TV show related inquiry I go to imdb.com. You know why? because it is 100% exactly that. A database. The fullest, up-to-date database that there possibly is for movie/television. It is so rich and full of content, that I i need to find a specific quote from any given movie, or even priceless trivia for that matter,I’m almost guaranteed to find it on the sidebar of the movies imdb page. You could have the coolest looking site but with out content, it might as well be covered in ads, because without content, there is no need for design.

I think website design is really circular. You need content to support your design, but without design nobody will get to your site. every part of the design process needs a solid performance from an other part in order to be a sufficient and dominant website.

Clearcast Digital Media Podcast

In most colleges class, the reading assignments given to students are commonly ignored. A syllabus is given at the beginning of the year, and students must stick to that sheet to know what reading they have to do. In this class, the assignments are given each week, and are all online which makes different pages much more accessible. Also When you only have to read 4 different links, it is allot easier than reading 2 chapters on something boring.I say this because I really enjoyed reading the links about getting started with HTML.  The link by Dave Raggett  was a really good basic overview of things you can do to a website with proper HTML.The Podcast that I listened to, from Clearcast Digital Media  was really good. It was a very basic podcast, but it was very clear. good background music, no other ambient sounds. The content they talked about was really interesting. While listening to it, I even jotted down some notes, because the guys talking seemed like they had a really good knowledge of new media. They began discussing what new media is, and why new media is “new”. Will new media always be called “new”?There were alot of key points that this podcast made. It discussed to uses of new media. It allows for a 2-way communication between the buyer and the seller. The more in-depth and sturctured a company’s website is, the more trust the viewer will have in purchasing products from that company.The podcast discussed allot about online advertising as a form of new media. Online advertising is a good tool because it can be directed at a specific target audience, as opposed to spending lots of money on TV advertising that will directly to a larger quantity of people, but in a much broader field. The main key of online advertising is that you have a huge audience, and the investment is minimal.They discussed one example of this idea. A company that sold blenders made a cheap advertisement called “Will It Blend” in which the CEO of the company tried to blend various objects: beef, cell phone, a watch, batteries. The ad cost little to make and became a hilarious “how-to” ad which spread across the internet. The ad cost little to make, and because it caught on so quickly (because of sites like youtube.com) has had over $6 million views. The biggest growth is online new media is in the problem solving field. Companies that have “how to” videos and other tools to help the users on the website gain lots of revenue from  viewer hits.The biggest thing i took from this podcast, is that incorporating video into any type of website completely enhances the website.In all, I really enjoyed this podcast. Very informative, and enjoyable to listen to.