Mission Statement: QU Branches

The goal of the Quinnipiac Branches site is to communicate various information to a diverse audience. The site will be an informational site listing events and services of QU Branches as well as a visually communicative site with pictures from past events. The design of the site will be an inspirational type, mainly with the powerful header drawing the users attention. The audience to be reached will be the campus community (students and faculty alike), as well as parents and religious institutions.

Site Seeing: You Need a Plan: Preparing for Content

- I like how the author compares a the organization of a website to a cd store. At a cd store each artist is listed in alphabetical order so that the customers can easily find what they are looking for. Websites should be the same way. They should easily point the customer in the right direction and be organized enough in order to lessen customer confusion and increase satisfaction.

- The author reminds us that we need to keep it simple. When dealing with navigation it is important to be straight forward and not clutter a bunch of things together, like search boxes, drop down menus, advertising links, etc. Many times this type of navigation can take over a page and draw the user away from the sites content and away from the site all together.

- Navigation mockups help a designer plan his/her site better. They provide a way for the designer to test out their navigation. The author suggests showing the mockup to someone and testing it. Asking them where they would expect to go when they click the link.

- The author talks about the personality of your website and how your website should have a voice. I agree with this statement. I think its important that a website needs to speak to its viewers on a different level. It needs to be able to clearly communicate the site to people in a way that they will comprehend.

- Unofortunately a web site does not look the same on all computers. Sometimes a designer must compromise in this situation. They need to think about what is the most important element on the web site, and will it be functional for older browsers, older modems, and older computers. The digital world is diverse and a web site designer needs to be prepared for this.

Mission Statement- Personal Website

The goal for my personal website is to inform the world about myself. The site will be visually stimulating and will relate to my interests. It will contain pictures of the things I enjoy doing as well as some of the digital design work I have done. The main goal is to have the site be interesting enough to bring the user back for another visit.

Site Seeing- What do you want to say? Deciding on content?

-I like how the author talks about the importantce of using nonverbal cues in web sites in order to speak to the audience in a different way. A designer needs to take all elements into consideration when trying to communicate a website. This includes images, text, interaction, motion, etc.

-The author talks about each web page having a certain message that it sends to the audience. It is important for a designer to communicate on all levels to their audience in a form that is not confusing. The designer must remember that his/her audience is from all backgrounds, so the designer must speak a common language with everyone so that everyone can understand the web site's purpose.

-Getting to know a client is extremely important. You are building a website for your client so you need to know every little bit and detail of what THEY like. Sometimes an attached idea will get rejected by a client. In this case it is important to communicate with the client and understand what they want and what they intend to get out of having a website.

-If a designer anticipates the questions users will ask upon entering a web site, then he/she will have plenty of success in satisfying his customers. It is the process of putting yourself in someone else's shoes. If you prepare yourself better by anticipating questions, then your site will be more developed to meet your customer's needs.

-The author talked about the importance of a mission statement in this chapter. A mission statement is basically a short written description of what goals you want your website to accomplish as well as what the website will do for the audience. If a designer ever gets misguided or falls of course of their plan for the website, they can just look at the mission statement and see what exactly they want to accomplish.

Site Seeing: Introduction

This section goes through a brief history of the web up to the present day and what the book will talk about.

- I think its important on how quickly the web caught on to people in the academic and research field. These people are the founders of the web and if it hadn't been for them who knows where it would be today. The researchers found that this new data sharing technology was extremely helpful and useful to them as well as the rest of the world.

- After the release of Netscape Navigator in 1994, the world finally realized the power of the web. New pages were being built that incorporated imagery as well as text and layout tables. This turned out to be some of the webs first layout pages.

- As the web caught on, businesses and corporations started to build their own websites to branch themselves out to the world. This early version of web site building consisted of too many images. I think designers got too caught up in how they wanted the website to look, instead of pouring more thought into structure and organization.

- It seems as the web developed and pages increased, so did the page loading time. Designers were throwing a bunch of digital garbage on their website in order to try and catch the audience's eye. What they didn't pay attention to was the fact that most of the audience was on a slow dial up connection which caused the download time of pages to be drastically slow.

- It became apparent that web site designers were more interested in showing off their website than actually tuning into their customers wants and needs. This often lead to a customer leaving a website because there were too much imagery and not enough information on what they were looking for.

- Designers then thought that since they had large files to download, why not inform the user that there is a lot of content and to wait for the page too load. However, users became impatient with the loading time and often found themselves leaving the website.

- Usability guidelines were set in place for designers to minimize the time for a page load and maximize the organizational structure of the website so that the customer can find what he/she wants. The guidelines suggested less images and more structure.

- "A good website experience consists of useful and usable content framed by the principles of visual communication to create meaning and understanding for an audience." I found this quote to be the most useful when it comes to terms of creating the perfect website.

- Today, web designers need to take a more communicative approach. It is extremely important for a website to not only communicate visually, but to also be organized in a manner that the user will understand and be able to interact successfully with.

- Communication is the key to building a good website. A designer needs to visually communicate to his/her audience in a way that they will understand. The audience needs to be able to know that by clicking one link, it will take them to where they want to go and not something misleading. Good communication builds good websites.

This is the mock up for James' website.

Site Seeing: Preface




The preface covered a bunch of points that are crucial for web page design. I feel the most important point is the visual reference mainly because you want to attract the viewer's attention to get them to want to stay on your website and not instantly leave because of the tacky design style. You want your website to be remembered and revisited by the same people who then in turn will go and tell other people about a unique website they saw.

Structure is also a very important feature of websites. If a website is unorganzied and confusing, than the viewer is confused and will leave your site. An organized website is extremely important and vital for the life of a web page. People want to come onto a site and be able to find what they are looking for; if they can't, than they will go somewhere where they can understand what is going on.

The technical aspect of website building should be easy for the designer to understand. If the technicality is confusing, than the designer will not have success with their website. The designer needs to understand what their site does and what they want it to do in order for the structure and visual aspects to come into focus.