10 Principles Essential to Making Your Website Not Suck

While being introduced to web design in Year 2 Cyberarts, the first thing that we learned were the 10 principle that are essential to having a good website.

The 10 principles essential to having a good website are:

1. Don't make users think
2. Don't squander the user's patience
3. Manage to focus the user's attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Dont be afraid of white space

8. Communicate effectively with a visible language

9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often

The best way to learn how to make a good website is to start off with looking at a bad website.

This is a great example of a bad website because it does not follow any of 10 principles that make up a good website. The website is complicated and requires the user to read and think to navigate throughout the website. While visiting the website I became very impatient and could not focus because the images and text were placed randomly and were very unorganized. As you can see, this website sucks! It does not get its message through and I for one would not even bother trying to navigate through this website.

To relieve you of the disappointment from that horrible website, I have posted a screenshot of what a good website looks like.

The website is very simple and easy to use. The large use of white space allows the user to look at the options available without using much thought. Also the website designer added images with lots of colour to interest the website users attention. This website is a great example of what a good website looks like and if you do not want your website to completely suck, I suggest you follow the 10 simple principles posted above.

Realistic Sketching

Realistic sketching involves a lot of focus and patience. For the past 3 weeks in our year 2 Cyber Arts class we practiced sketching various skulls and poses. We received a project in which we draw still-life as realistic as possible. A method that i learned to make sketches realistic was to lightly do a contour sketch and add very light shades till it goes as dark as possible from a HB pencil to a 6B. This method is hard because it involves a lot of time and patience. You have to be precise with your movements in order to prevent yourself from smudging the graphite on the paper. The goal was to make a clean realistic sketch and i feel that my work could have been improved. If i had to redo it, i would have focused more on the light shades and the proportions of the images. In the end I feel that i had done a pretty good job and was impressed with how realistic i could make an image look like.

Driving Me Crazy

1. My Concept:

My original concept was to show how much stress students take in high school during exams. But as I started to elaborate on the concept of stress, I thought of dyslexia. I thought about how students with dyslexia feel immense amounts of stress because the words they see are flying around in their heads and are not sending clear messages to their brains. As I read about dyslexia on the internet, I found out many interesting facts. I found out about how students with dyslexia go through immense stress, feel stupid, feel lonely, feel like outcasts. As I read these articles on the internet, I thought that these emotions dyslexic people go through are very surreal. I thought I could portray these emotions in my pictures as a form of surrealist art.

2. Process:

Most of the pictures in this photograph were taken by me for example the picture of the boy in the desk ( also known as Nic, my Cyberarts friend), the chalk board and desk, the class, and the words. The picture taken off of the internet was the picture of the teacher standing. Getting these pictures was very difficult. I took pictures of Nic in the photography studio sitting on a desk. It took about 30 shots to get the perfect picture. I had to make shore the lighting was perfect, and with a little help from my Cyberarts teacher Mrs. Silverman, I got it right. The easy pictures were the picture of Nic and the blackboard. Though they did require many shots, they did not require as much work. The hardest picture to take was the picture of the classroom. Mainly because I had to make a classroom. I had to take ten desks from the photography room and place it inside the projector room where the desk and chalkboard were located. This took about fifteen minutes, luckily I had some help from my fellow classmates. After 40 minutes of setting up I managed to get almost everyone in the picture including me :), unfortunately it took a while to get the right picture, mainly because everyone was goofing off, but what do you expect right, its high school. After 20 minutes of browsing through pictures I found the ones I needed and got strait to work. Creating the picture was the hardest part. I had to cut each character out of its original picture and paste it into a new page. Cutting the pictures out was very hard because it had to be perfect, if I messed up I had to start all over again. 2 of the most difficult steps were to blend the picture of the class room into the blackboard and to make the words look like they are coming out of the chalk board. To get the classroom into the chalk board I had to try many methods like cropping, smudging, change of contrast, merging, liquifying, blurring, colour change and healing. To get it right I had to use 2 periods of class. It took long because it was my first time using photo shop. To get the words to have a wave affect I had to warp the words and change the sizes. The easy part of the words was changing the color of the words. I simply had to use the lasso tool and highlight the text. Than change the hue and saturation to make the letters black or white so they stand out. I had to do this to get my point across. By highlighting words like dyslexia, stress and difficulty reading, I got my point across to the viewer that the picture is about dyslexia and what the definition of dyslexia is. The easy pictures were the picture of Nic sitting in the desk and the picture of the teacher standing. To put Nic into the picture I simply had to cut him out of his original picture and paste him into a new page. I wanted to make the teacher look like he is in two different places at the same time, so I simply copied a picture of him, used the magic wand tool, and made an outline of the teacher, than I cut the original cutout in half, stuck the outline in a layer behind him and pasted them in front of the chalk board. To make it look like their in two different places I copied the desk and stuck it in front of the outline. After everything was on the new black page I blurred the edges of every picture so they all looked like they are real and belong where they are. The last thing left to do was to add a shadow in front of Nic. All I did was use the brush tool, drew what looks like a shadow and changed the hue, lightness and saturation to make it look real. After 1 and a half week, I was done.

3. Conclusion:

I was very happy with my overall result. I thought it was a great experience and learned a lot on a program I had never used before. I learned that I can figure things out on my own and that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. I am pretty happy with what I have and would not really want to change anything.

Chess Piece Complete

Racism video complete !! :D

1. The main focus of our rasicm video was to show discrimination. though we tried to focus on it, we did not reach our aim and created a big jumble of small thoughts representing racism.

2. The video gets the point across to the audiance by showing them the thoughts of our fellow students in our school.

3. The technique we used to get the point across to the audiance was to ask students to describe racism in one word. Also we crated music that started of slow and went fasted as the thought progressed about racism.

4. Truthfully I am not satisfied with our end result. I think it can be improved alot. Though I liked the shots of people we took, I think we could have made our video focus on an act of racism because that would get the message across to the people, for example people playing soccer but they do not let a kid play because he is younger. Its a form of discrimination and it would get the message across quickly. Also we could have made a rap song. Though that was our original idea, we did not suceed because we had gotten distracted and ran out of time. If we had planned out our time more wisely I think we would have succeeded but thats the past and well, there always next year.

5. I think we can improve our video by getting shots that actually do represent acts of discrimination and by improving our music alittle. Though it goes slow and fast to show alittle seriousness in the concept of rascism it can be improved to a more mellow tone because our end result was alittle happy and not as mellow.

To veiw our end result of our rascism video, go to: http://ashketchumpokemon.blogspot.com/

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

Speed Zee