Week 3
Wow 10 days have slipped by and I am desperately trying to play catch-up. The principles of design has been a great asset for preparation but I’m spending more time thinking about what to do than actually doing it on the computer and working full time with two children leaves little time for my classes.
I’ve decided to design a site for a hypothetical nursery- Green Gaia Growers (I work for a nursery and hope to use this project as inspiration for an actual site for work). Green Gaia will specialize in Florida natives and earth-friendly gardening/landscaping materials. The last page will be a library and organization link page for low impact landscaping resources.
Website reviews:
http://www.icann.org/
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN is a non profit organization dedicated to the preservation of individual domain names on the internet. Basically, ICANN promotes peaceful solutions for the internet community without formal authority. The website, last updated in Feb 2008, has a hoorizontal menu below the header and a left column navigation(most common) with a variety of icons for links. The right side has a video display. The footage is well edited for an otherwise uninteresting ICANN presentation.
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/main.htm
Wow. These guys measure global data flow by sending test data from A-B and back. An index scale from 0(slow)-100(fast) indicates the speed of connection. Say you’re online-conferencing from New York to Singapore. If the connection is failing, you can visit this site to see if the region of Asia is having an internet traffic jam instead of freaking out at your laptop.
The site has a simple blue silhouette world map with white background. Each continent has a speed rating posted and colored red,yellow, or green accordingly. The FAQ section can be linked from the horizontal menu. There you’ll find out that they don’t have access to enough routers in Africa to provide a report. Overall, this site is clean and simple with easy to read charts, and minimal color scheme.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
Another clean and easily navigable site. Fascinating data regarding internet usage by region: 48.1% of Europeans use the internet representing 26.3% yet73.6% of North Americans are users representing only17%. The big winner -Asia uses 39.5% of traffic. There are links to several of the other sites reviewed this week and there are many colorful charts reporting usage. However, a breakdown by nationstates would be useful. Geographically, Mexico as an economically disadvantaged part of the North American region probably skews the results for what some may mistake as U.S. usage.
http://www.caida.org/home/
The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis site is perfect for the internet-tech enthusiast (lots of reports that were of little interest to me). Nevertheless, the site was (of course) well composed. I’ve noticed the use of white backgrounds in most of the sites reviewed. We probably tend to try to colorize everything in our web editors, but as J. Beaird points out we want people to see the text clearly. If someone with poor eyesight does not see a distinct contrast between text and background they might look elsewhere. White solves the problem.
http://pewresearch.org/
Ahh. Now here is a site that I am all too familiar with. As an undergrad in Sociology/Poli-sci I found myself using this resource regularly. Pew Research Center is a treasure trove of social science stats and the website with three-column navigation allows you follow links to all their latest polls. The center column is currently loaded with reports on the U.S. presidential campaign.
http://usfweb2.usf.edu/ur/webadmin/webguide.html
Good thing I read this. I was just about to post images of barbaric sex toys to my web page. Naughty, Naughty!!
Seriously, posting the USF web guidelines was a good idea. We have the opportunity to have fun and be creative with this but we do have to respectfully consider that the space is provided by the school.