One of the many things that is most striking about Melbourne, especially to an outsider, is really how multi-cultural it is. Just in the last month, there has been the Viva Victoria Festival, Chapel Street Festival, the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Melbourne International Dragon Boat Festival, Thai Culture and Food Festival, World Street Food Festival, Turkish Pazar Festival, Antipodes Glendi Festival, etc. So, the idea that we had for a website was about this aspect of Melbourne. It is a big topic. So anyone interested in this and with ideas to narrow it down, define the scope, etc, please feel free to contribute.
This site would be targeted at International students, people from overseas who have just landed in Melbourne and backpackers looking for a taste of the multicultural aspects of Melbourne. It’s not for local, Melburnians, per se.
There are several categories that I could think of. Food, Events, Visits of Important Dignitaries, Performing Arts (Music, Dance, Theatre), Fine Art, World Market (Retail, Shopping), Festivals, Reviews. For International Students - jobs, visa advice, public transport, things to do and places to see, dating, housing. The site could take up one aspect and diversify within that. Searches can be conducted based on suburbs, months, calendar days, cultures, communities, etc. Any ideas?
There are a few “aggregator” sites out there that do a little bit of all this. What can a new site offer in terms of a USP (like gumtree, etc) that is totally different from the options already available? How can it be a one-stop shop for multicultural activities in Melbourne, at any given time of the year, in any suburb? I’d like it to link to other official sites – like Victoria public transport, etc – just to add to the authenticity.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Elements of a Good Website
Assuming that we all agree on what makes a good book or a good film as opposed to a bad one (although I admit this is rather subjective and there’s no black or white aspect to this), I’m sure we all agree there are certain “ingredients” that go into making a good film or a good book, say in a genre like science fiction, drama, romantic-comedy, etc. For the sake of argument, let’s leave out the finer aspects of narrative style, cinematography and other aesthetic nuances that apply to both books and films.
Websites are no different. I’ve been snooping around and checking out various types of websites: from websites of IT companies, to newspapers, restaurants and bars, to internet dating and matrimony sites. Here are some elements that I thought were crucial to making a good website:
- It should be interactive - create and share media
- It should embed user generated content experience
- It should have appropriate gatekeeping methods
- It should be in line with its funding, advertisers
- It should have a USP and target a specific audience profile and be consistent with regard to that section. It can’t appeal to all and sundry
- It should build brand loyalty and ensure repeated visits by the chosen audience, while constantly reaching out to other people of the same category, attracting others to join
- It should appear that it is live and not static - that it is being moderated and updated regularly by real people who are interested in communicating with and building an audience base
- It can share images, announce news, videos of group activities, inform members about upcoming events, meetings, encourage members to contribute towards reviews, reports, experiences
- It must link to other similar, related sites
- It must have a convenient way to search for information - a good search algorithm, with user-intuitive, useful, relevant search criteria
These were the ones I thought were most crucial in determining a great site from an ok site. Feel free to add to this list.
Building Blocks
I think at this point it maybe a good idea to spell out how crucial it is for all of us to get the basics right, from the start. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is really the virtual address of the actual server (sitting somewhere in the world) that hosts the web page that you are requesting. It’s a good idea to remember that every URL must be preceded with “http://” or “https://”, because all servers that are connected to the internet, that host web pages, work under the HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) internet protocol. It could be a secure one (like e-commerce websites, e-banking, etc), and hence the “https://” (“s” for secure). So, prefixing this notation is crucial to hyper linking, which in turn is crucial to the world on online production!
Another nice tip I thought I should share is about the link text. I’ve taken this from Ian Lloyd, Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS (second edition), 2008, who has in turn sourced it from Jukka Korpela, Why ‘Click here’ is bad linking practice:
Finally, here are two articles that I thought may be useful to us.
1) Create Your Own Free Website, is an article that appeared in Brisbane Times in April 2009. This one examines different hosting sites and compares and contrasts the free construction tools available, including Weebly, Wetpaint and WordPress.
2) Link Juice - How to Make People Link to your Website, appeared in The Age on March 16 this year. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is a very important aspect to keep in mind about making your presence felt in the huge online ocean. As easy as getting published seems, getting noticed, amidst the huge clutter of everything that there is on the world wide web, is really a different ball game altogether. To draw a parallel to the paper publishing industry, it is the same as the number of copies printed versus the number of copies actually sold (Nielsen BookScan sort of data), the stuff that makes a book a bestseller; or like in the film industry, the box office rating. This article introduces the importance of getting noticed and briefly examines the “right ways” (a combination of aesthetic and technical prowess) to go about achieving that.
Another nice tip I thought I should share is about the link text. I’ve taken this from Ian Lloyd, Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML and CSS (second edition), 2008, who has in turn sourced it from Jukka Korpela, Why ‘Click here’ is bad linking practice:
The link text—the words inside the anchor element, which appear underlined on the screen—should be a neat summary of that link’s purpose (for example, email bob@bubbleunder.com). All too often, you’ll see people asking you to “Click here to submit an image,” or “Click here to notify us of your change of address” when “Submit an image,” or “Notify us of your change of address” more than suffices. Never use “Click here” links—it really is bad linking practice and is discouraged for usability and accessibility reasons.
Finally, here are two articles that I thought may be useful to us.
1) Create Your Own Free Website, is an article that appeared in Brisbane Times in April 2009. This one examines different hosting sites and compares and contrasts the free construction tools available, including Weebly, Wetpaint and WordPress.
2) Link Juice - How to Make People Link to your Website, appeared in The Age on March 16 this year. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is a very important aspect to keep in mind about making your presence felt in the huge online ocean. As easy as getting published seems, getting noticed, amidst the huge clutter of everything that there is on the world wide web, is really a different ball game altogether. To draw a parallel to the paper publishing industry, it is the same as the number of copies printed versus the number of copies actually sold (Nielsen BookScan sort of data), the stuff that makes a book a bestseller; or like in the film industry, the box office rating. This article introduces the importance of getting noticed and briefly examines the “right ways” (a combination of aesthetic and technical prowess) to go about achieving that.
What’s the fuss about?
I was at the International Women’s Day Lunch here at the University, where Catherine Deveny, a popular columnist with The Age, was the guest speaker. She was hilarious. Apart from the many things she said (digs at Abbott’s missionary positions he needs to fill in his stationery cabinet, etc!), she said something so relevant to our course that I thought I must share with you. To paraphrase her, she said it’s the internet that will ultimately liberate most people from most of their problems. The context to this was of course, repression of women by religion and a patriarchal society. Having a website should be the ultimate goal. “Have a website. Tell the world who you are, what you do, how you can be contacted! Everyone will and should have a website!” And she talked about how pure academic circles have a prejudice about online referencing, research and people who have “blogs” and have a “website”. It’s almost like it is tabooed in the pure academic world.
Ok, so assuming we’ve all happily arrived at the conclusion that we need to have a website to be heard and noticed, the next impediment is how do we go about doing that? It’s not as simple as having a lot of ideas and thoughts and being armed with fluency in English (or whatever the lingua franca is), writing or inscribing equipment -- pen, pencil, paper, for the more quaint, a typewriter, and for the more technically contemporary, a laptop or a personal computer with an easy to use interface of a word processing software application -- and voila, you are ready to disseminate your pearly words of wisdom and wit to the whole world (or the readership you intend!). To publish your ideas online, to host your own website involves a whole gamut of other skills that are traditionally outside the scope of “pure aesthetic” preoccupations!
For most of us who pride ourselves in being practitioners of the high aesthetic, the arts -- the writers, artists and creators -- up until now have been purely devoted to the seemingly isolated, “elevated” area of the creation of the aesthetic and not entirely too concerned with the more “crass” aspects of its real-time “process of production”. We never did have to concern ourselves with say printing, page layout, pixels, typesetting, kerning, leading, alignment, folios, indexing, navigation, binding, distribution, etc. Just take care of the ideas and writing and there will be others to take care of the rest of everything that falls under the broad heading of “production”.
But now, with this whole merger of form and content, we, the writers and creators of content and ideas, have to delve into the realm of the current technology of “online production”. We have to now dabble with “HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, URL, CSS, JavaScript, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, Hosts, Clients, Servers, Databases and finally Dreamweaver”. Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University (US), has this very interesting YouTube video that describes all this, called “The Machine is Us/ing Us”.
After watching the amazing film Julie and Julia, it would seem that it’s really not that hard. All you need is a blog host and you can start firing away and publishing online, just like Julie Powell does “365 days, 524 recipes”. But going by all the heavy, technical sessions we’ve had so far, our task seems more daunting than that!
I find myself seeking comfort in Robert M. Pirsig’s priceless words from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about people like me who are living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, having something to do with it, but being outside of it, detached, removed: Involved in it but not in such a way, as to care.
This is something some of you may have come across already. But it just seemed very relevant against Pirsig’s views. It is a little audience survey, “What is a Web Browser”, that google conducted prior to the launch of their own web browser, Chrome. It really reiterates the fact that the users of a product, technology in this case, really don’t know exactly what it is or how to define it. The point is do we need to know? And if so, how much do we need to know?
Ok, so assuming we’ve all happily arrived at the conclusion that we need to have a website to be heard and noticed, the next impediment is how do we go about doing that? It’s not as simple as having a lot of ideas and thoughts and being armed with fluency in English (or whatever the lingua franca is), writing or inscribing equipment -- pen, pencil, paper, for the more quaint, a typewriter, and for the more technically contemporary, a laptop or a personal computer with an easy to use interface of a word processing software application -- and voila, you are ready to disseminate your pearly words of wisdom and wit to the whole world (or the readership you intend!). To publish your ideas online, to host your own website involves a whole gamut of other skills that are traditionally outside the scope of “pure aesthetic” preoccupations!
For most of us who pride ourselves in being practitioners of the high aesthetic, the arts -- the writers, artists and creators -- up until now have been purely devoted to the seemingly isolated, “elevated” area of the creation of the aesthetic and not entirely too concerned with the more “crass” aspects of its real-time “process of production”. We never did have to concern ourselves with say printing, page layout, pixels, typesetting, kerning, leading, alignment, folios, indexing, navigation, binding, distribution, etc. Just take care of the ideas and writing and there will be others to take care of the rest of everything that falls under the broad heading of “production”.
But now, with this whole merger of form and content, we, the writers and creators of content and ideas, have to delve into the realm of the current technology of “online production”. We have to now dabble with “HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP, URL, CSS, JavaScript, Web Browsers, Operating Systems, Hosts, Clients, Servers, Databases and finally Dreamweaver”. Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University (US), has this very interesting YouTube video that describes all this, called “The Machine is Us/ing Us”.
After watching the amazing film Julie and Julia, it would seem that it’s really not that hard. All you need is a blog host and you can start firing away and publishing online, just like Julie Powell does “365 days, 524 recipes”. But going by all the heavy, technical sessions we’ve had so far, our task seems more daunting than that!
I find myself seeking comfort in Robert M. Pirsig’s priceless words from his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He talks about people like me who are living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, having something to do with it, but being outside of it, detached, removed: Involved in it but not in such a way, as to care.
I just think that flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
This is something some of you may have come across already. But it just seemed very relevant against Pirsig’s views. It is a little audience survey, “What is a Web Browser”, that google conducted prior to the launch of their own web browser, Chrome. It really reiterates the fact that the users of a product, technology in this case, really don’t know exactly what it is or how to define it. The point is do we need to know? And if so, how much do we need to know?
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