Week Thirteen Readings

there were no set readings over christmas and after a few hard weeks i’ve had its time to get back into the routine of knuckling down and getting some work done.

Week 13 readings.

Social Media in Technical Communications (2010)

this article was written to summarise the main advantages and disadvantages of using social networking websites such as facebook, twitter and others which aren’t as well known such as tumblr. This article explains all the different uses for the different social networks which most of us are aware of to help businesses by promoting offers etc on a facebook wall which the people who like the company and have them as a friend can see and take interest in.

 

crisis in a networked world (2009)

Researched from the university of colorado, the depths of crisis within social networking is looked into. Social network pages can have linking pages to profiles or groups for memories or topics the users like but in a crisis these pages are used to bring back those memories to share with others they may know.

Cultural Difference in motivations for using social networks (2011)

This article is based on mainly how social networks are constantly growing and how much they have grown already to this date however its uses change within different cultures therefore this article examines the motives of social networks used by American and Korean college students. The results show that Korean students use social networking more to strengthen existing relationships and social support whereas more Americans use it as a general source of entertainment.

week 11 readings.

It is the last week before the christmas holidays! We have no set readings for next week however there are three new articles i wish to summarise right now.

 

Article One was written by Hackett, S and Parmanto, B. This article tried to explain to its readers why it is so useful to take in all considerations of a website as a whole whilst testing different aspects of the site. It went into great depth of accessibility and uses when on the internet, it also showed limitations within a website however it also gave detail and recognised some solutions to issues faced.

Article Two was written by Harper, S and Chen, A.Q based on the quidelines of web accessibility and evolution of the web. This article was focusing on interfaces and that when a new interface is made, requirements need to be met for the audience and users purposes. This leads to guidlines and how it helps prevent issues or can help disabled users function the web properly without any contstraints of access to the website.

The final article, article 3 was based on the accessibility of German and UK tourism information sites written by Williams, R, Rulzion, R and Stork A. This article was written with the intentionsof focusing on accessibility for all as well as target audiences including users with disabilities which may be limited as to what they can do which is a very important thing to include when working on the web.

week 10 web development readings.

This week there were three given articles to read; J Nielson, JM Faber and X Fang.

 The first article on the list to read was Nielson .J. called ‘ Learning from the real world ‘ which based itself on the use of different tools, concepts, techniques and user interfaces. this article continued to talk about computer systems.

 The next article was written by fang which was related to ‘ Impacts of navigation structure, task complexity, and users’ domain knowledge on Web site usability ‘ back in 2011. This article was focused on things such as structures of a web page e.g. hierarchical. It also focused on aspects such as web testing and its limitations.

 The final article was written by Nielson and JM Faber called ‘ Improving System Usability through Parallel Design ‘. Previously I can’t say I knew a lot about parallel designs or what they really do. We are shown several designs based on a concept to have an overall finished piece, some are simple whereas some are detailed and contain lots of interaction between the computer and the user. Then the overall design will be determined amongst the group of designers who have all contributed ideas. 

Lecture readings for week 9

Reading one – High fidelity or low fidelity, paper or computer? choosing attributes when testing prototypes’: written by Walker M, Takayama k and Landay JA in 2002, explains the depth of prototypes and fidelity. It gives several examples such as ‘sketches’ are low fidelity which are inexpensive and quick.

reading two – The blank page technique:reinvigorating paper prototyping in usability testing: written by B Still and J Morris focusing on paper based prototyping. It provides several the benefits such as imposing very few constraints on designs. They also provided negative points such as limited interaction, if any. 

reading three – the anatomy of prototypes: as filters, prototypes as manifestations of design ideas: written by YK Lim, E Stolterman and J Tenenberg back in 2008, informing us about the roles of prototypes and why they are needed alongside the research behind it so that we can distinguish different types of prototypes with different fidelity levels and how there are two aspects of prototypes to form the base of a framework.

week 8 readings.

This weeks articles are based on information architecture by G.K Green in 2001 which discusses how information architecture is new and recently discovered in developing such as new ways of browsing for different reasons to accesses websites which they desire to retrieve relevant information.

Another article was called ‘complexity and the practice of web information architecture’ by S Buford in 2011. This was based on the practicality of information architecture within organisations and businesses. He focused on how information architecture is used within businesses.

Finally, the last article we had to read this week is ‘the information architecture’ by A Nawaz in 2012, the article is based on the different features that can change users thoughts on a websites layout and presentation and how the use of information architecture has transformed the web and helps to suit the needs of a user.

Nierdest J Robbins – Chapter 14-16 ‘Learning Web Design: 4th Edition’.

For week 7 we had to read two chapters from a book that we had to purchase for our course. This book is one of the main books that we shall be using for our first year in web designs with Peter. This book is also known as the beginners guide to HTML, XHTML, Style sheets and Web graphics which is a very detailed and complex read.

 The book is talking about borders and margins in chapters 14-16 as well as padding which allows space to be left in between content on a website and which area on a webpage it would be most appropriate can be set to your desires. borders can be placed on a web page and colours can be changed with it. margins are placed on a page just like in a notepad for the purpose that it lines the text up neatly rather than scrolling off the sides of a page. These chapters continued to describe how different elements can be controlled such as image size, backgrounds and so on which can relate to what we are doing in CS6 and give me tips that i can apply in my next web design lecture.

week 6 reading

this week I read two different articles for web. the first article I read was chapter 8 in a book written by Freeman and Freeman from the ‘Head first HTML with CSS and XHTML’. it talks in detail about using CSS with XHTML and how the coding is different e.g. using p { rather than <p> and the same tags were shown for Headings. By knowing how to use CSS, it makes coding easier and neater to do.

The other article that I had to read for this week was written by B Thomas called ‘cascade effects’. This article also looked at CSS to change the Body, headings, paragraphs and so on. It shows the contrasts between CSS and HTML. It can allow us to use many styles sheets to share them across multiple pages even if something is changed on one page in CSS e.g. one page may be fit to purpose for the usage on a mobile/portable device. the article also explains the future of this process such as using CSS1 and CSS2 and how the softwares differ, CSS2 making more improvements over CSS1 and how it has greater controls over the commands such as fonts.

Typography

Typography is a huge part in a graphical user interface (GUI). A good graphical interface depends on how well typography is used to visualise text on a webpage, this included the uses of different fonts, sizes and colours such as sans and serifs fonts. This overall was a fairly long and detailed about what we can see on a page such as line spacings, word spacings which are the most suitable to read. the average text size is 12 and the average 65 is the average characters per line.Typography changes many things just by how it is written and coded.

Learning HTML

So now in web design (Cis1007) we are getting into the practical work and i’m really beginning to enjoy it. At first I though my strong point was being able to grasp programming quickly but I also feel confident learning coding and It’s becoming clearer which pathways I’m looking for a career in in the future. To start off nice and simple we had a 9am seminar (horrible timing!) then in our 1am-12pm class, we were given printed sheets of what a basic web page would look like, we had to label different parts of coding that we could see on the sheet so that we knew what we were looking for and then in CS6 dreamweaver we began to code up our own page which we saved as a html document and ran it to see if it worked, so far no issues in web!

Week Three Readings :)

Article One: Mark up systems and the future of scholarly text processing.

Written by Coombs,Renear and Derose explaining the meaning of markups and theories. The definition of mark up in computer science is a collection of tags describing the specifications of an electronic document which determine the presentation of a document and how to maintain the language of markup. This article states the advantages from using markups such as not having to ‘re-key documents’ limiting issues and expenses. 

Article Two: WWW – Whence, Whither, What Next? 

Schulzrinne wrote this article for its readers to understand the past experiences with the internet and what to expect next during the modification of the world wide web. The reading focused on aspects such as HTTP, HTML and URL’s and other technological terms which i honestly have no idea about such as URN’s (Universal resource names) and URC’s (Uniform Resource Citations). Whereas the other article focused on advantages, this specific reading focused more on disadvantages of the web browsers. 

Article Three: HTML5 – Leading A Web Revolution.

The third and final article that I had to read this week was based on HTML5, written by Anthes. This article relates to markup languages and how all links to the WWW are upgrading to make something better for their users by creating HTML5 and how it will use new markup language so that other html documents which use CSS or java can be used. HTML5 will mainly be running from upgraded pieces but not all will have been changed to completely recreate HTML. The article also states that the company named ‘Ocupop’ have already started using a new markup.