Week 10 - Graduate VICTORIOUS!

Thanks for the fun, Dr. Simon! I hope you enjoy my site and blog. (Next week I'll be enjoying the Carribean by cruise ship as a graduation present!)

Site Reviews - Week 9

http://www.flashvista.com/
With news, tutorials and an almost overabundance of Flash websites, FlashVista provides a plethora of resources for the adventurous Flash developer. The design of that website itself is a little overwhelming- lots of text on a white background without a lot of direction for the eyes. It looks more like an advertising page that most web surfers avoid than a resource site, especially for design.

http://www.lukamaras.com/tutorials/cool-design/hitech-floating-menu.html
No surprises site about Flash tutorials. Great detail and lots of information. Unimaginative but extremely functional and easy to navigate design.

http://www.sitepal.com/
This was an UNBELIEVABLE concept! This site helps you construct an avatar and connects voice messages with it for web sites, blogs, email and more. They will take your own picture and construct an avatar that looks like you, and you can even record your own voice for the message. I went to http://www.americantesol.com/ to check out some in action, and it was really cool to see how they used the avatars on their site and as part of their educational program.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/
Premier vehicle for creating interactive content. Flash incoporates imports from Photoshop and Illustrator to power up the graphics side of the program. Expensive, but worth the money for anyone serious about design with a long-term goal in mind.

http://www.swishzone.com/index.php
Site for interactive content creation software. News, some tutorials, and ideas are all sections of the site as well. One of the most interesting features of this site was the 8 languages provided for browsers, selected by country flag in the top right of the screen.

http://www.hotscripts.com/
Huge resource site with lots of scripts, links, helps and ideas. Really busy visual site, a little bit offputting to my eye. I would only use this site if I found it with a web search for something specific.

http://www.soundstageav.com/mastersonaudio/20050201.htm
Great explanation of the MP3 format. Decent site design- I liked that the background was cream and not bright white.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
AWESOME sound editor. I just recently used Audacity in a tech teacher workshop I attended. The possibilities for recording and editing audio are endless with this software, especially in conjunction with royalty free music or a free digital music composer.

http://www.pandora.com/
What a FANTASTIC site! You type in your favorite artist, song or genre, and it personalizes your radio station. Just for fun, I typed in "Love Shack" by the B52s, and it played "Lovefool" by The Cardigans, "Little Miss Can't Be Wrong" by Spin Doctors, "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits, and "Simply Irresistible" by Robert Palmer.

http://www.trellian.com/webpage/
Trellian is an absolutely free web page editor, with some of the same features as FrontPage and DreamWeaver. It also supports some Photoshop plug-ins for image editing. The website provides tips, a user manual, free downloads, and a useful FAQ page.

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/
SeaMonkey is an all-in-one internet app suite. Including and email and newsgroup client, IRC chat, and HTML made simpler. It uses a lot of the same source code as other Mozilla programs. The site itself is nice, soothing colors, and easy to use. Mozilla is my favorite web company!

Fancy Buttons and Menus and Audio and Video - Week 8

Fancy buttons and menus are aesthetically pleasing navigational tools for site users. They can be individual graphics, regions of one whole graphic, or images of fancy text. Adding an interesting layer of design, they also serve a practical function. In my site, I chose to put in a single menu graphic, and add an image map to create links on each page. The step-by-step instructions in the book were very useful.

Audio and video files are essential pieces of every person's web experience. Just look at any teen's mySpace page and you find at least one multimedia item, with most incorporating up to or more than a dozen. The first choice a web designer has is whether to link to the file on an external page or embed it in an existing one. This depends on the size and format of the multimedia file, because of the necessity for some files to also have an embedded player. Many sites have streaming background music for users. It is important to give users a choice by allowing them to turn the sound off, so that those who listen to their own music are not disturbed or distracted by your choice. Videos are huge files, but can be effective for illustrating points or impressing potential clients. I don't really see a need for any at this point, but possibly could add tutorial videos in the future.

Site Reviews - Week 8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources
Basically, this wikipedia page is a long list of links to resources and web sites for images. Some of the categories include historical, art, books, logos, postage stamps, culture, religion, computer-generated, and many more.

http://www.libraryspot.com/images.htm
Library Spot provides a list of links gathered specifically for searchers. Their mission states: "We created LibrarySpot.com to break through the information overload of the Web and bring the best library and reference sites together with insightful editorial in one user-friendly spot." These hand-selected sites are easier to wade through than the millions of hits a Google search unearthed.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/
A Web technology news site, there were a lot of interesting articles about current trends, developments and products. My favorite was the Top 10 YouTube videos of all time- the information in the article was interesting, with music artists taking 7 of the 10 slots. I really liked the format and design of the web page- lots to look at without being overwhelming.

http://www.footnote.com/
What an amazing site!! This site has digital images of documents from around the world. Mome than 4.4 million images have been uploaded since the site's inception. The site has a partnership with the US National Archive to digitize primary source documents integral to American history. I was completely unaware this site existed, and I was floored by how much is available.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html
Photoshop is the premier photo editing tool in graphic design right now. The possibilities are pretty much endless for an experienced user, especially with all the add ons available. Another advantage is the prevalence of tutorials, helps and idea sites online.

http://www.gimp.org/
Gimp is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It shares some of the same features as Photoshop, but is a free, open source program. 'Nuff said.

Images - Week 7

This is almost an overwhelming topic- so much of what users of a website take away are the images they view. Whether pictures, graphics, text that functions as a graphic, or animations, images work together with the color scheme to convey a mood to the user. Three questions which should guide the selection process are:
1. Is it relevant?
2. Is it interesting?
3. Is it appealing?
A variety of things can be used to enhance, clean up and modify image files to create the emotion, look or feel you seek in the overall scheme of your site. Photoshop and other similar programs have editing software that allows you to crop, filter, modify colors and shapes, as well as use aspects of one picture with another to create a completely new idea.

Another major issue in using images is ownership rights. There are several options, including self-originated photography, royalty-free stock photography, rights-managed stock photography and images with a Creative Commons license (free for use under certain conditions). One option that should be avoided is stealing copyrighted images from other sites.

Personally, I'm using graphics I created in Photoshop from images with a Creative Commons license, which allows all use except for commercial. Since the site I have is a school site, there is no conflict of interest.