26 Sep 2008 [ Prev | Next ]

Organization and Content

These are notes I'll refer to during tomorrow's lecture.. you're welcome to explore these, but I'm not asking you to read them all in advance. (I hope that, after the lecture, you might be intrigued enough to come back and explore these links as you begin developing your own web sites.)

The theory of hypertext existed long before the WWW
Kilian wrote "Writing for the Web" for an audience that was familiar with the print world, and needed to be introduced to the internet. (Note that his chapters refer to 1950s slang and 1970s sitcoms.)   When I first started making web sites, most educators simply thought of web sites as convenient ways to reduce photocopying costs (by telling people to download and print out whatever handouts they wanted).

The SHU blogosphere, and more specifically my strategy of getting you to read and link to each other's blogs, to write richly hyperlinked essays, and to create a mini index on every page of the EL236 website, is designed to take advantage of the fact that with every link we create, we teach the World Wide Web what matters to us.

Michael Wesh created an eloquent video that explains it all. (Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us.)

Ok.. so that was exciting. What do we do with all these ideas?
  • We can put cameras on the eyeballs of volunteers, and measure what people look at when they visit web pages. (See eyetracking heat maps: hotter colors show what people looked at more.)
  • We can write several different versions of the same web site, and study how quickly, efficiently, and happily people were able to use each version.  (See Jakob Nielsen, How Users Read on the Web, written in 1997, but still completely valid.)
  • We can look at Web Pages That Suck (and learn from other people's mistakes)
  • We can learn how to be polite when we tell other people their web pages suck (it's fun for teachers and students to rip into web pages that make obvious mistakes, but it's unkind and unwise to offend someone you might want to hire you to fix their site's weaknesses, so learn to be kind when you offer constructive criticism)

I've introduced you to the theory and the science because I want you to understand why I make the recommendations that you'll find in the following handouts. 

Categories
:

Leave a comment


Type the characters you see in the picture above.

August
          1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31            
September
  01 2 03 4 05 6
7 08 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30        
October
      01 2 03 4
5 06 7 08 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31  
November
            1
2 03 4 05 6 07 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30            
December
  01 2 03 4 05 6
7 08 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31