Activity 802: Publishing using a blog

Advantages:

• Blogs can be a positive why of gaining regular feedback and discussion
• Most blog sites are free to join, which means it encourages people to join and reply to your post
• Maintenance is controlled by the website owners so you don’t have to worry about it
• Blogs are quite straightforward to update in a technical sense

Disadvantages:

• Negative responses from users can sometimes be unconstructive and no better than spam
• Blogs can require quite a lot of time to write constructively.
• The website maybe closed due to maintenance or site problems meaning you cannot access your blog and other people can’t comment on it.
• Some blogs may not get comments or discussion so you should think about your content to attract readers and comments.
• Blogs have very limited customisability, unlike the full customisability of a website.

Activity 801: Publishing using a web site

example website: http://www.muzos-rock-academy.com/

Advantages of using publishing on the web using a website:

• It allows you to give users a way of contacting you, by publishing contact details on the web example: http://www.muzos-rock-academy.com/contactForm.html  This gives the opportunity to use a built in web form.
• You can tailor your information to target specific users, for example in this case it would be for people seeking Guitar or Bass tuition, so the website is segmented into the relevant sections
• The style of the website can be customized to suite the websites topic, for example the pictures used represent the colours of the business, and the images relate to guitars

Disadvantages of using a website.

• Can take a while to plan and construct a website, as well as learn the required techniques such as CSS and XHTML

Activity 703:Using a blog for publishing

Activity 702:Using a standard web site

The Advantages of Publishing to a standard website:

• You can usually fully customise the look and style of your website to your own tastes
• You can upload whatever content you want, video, pictures, flash, downloadable files.
• You normally have a large amount of memory to hold your sites files in
• The Bandwidth

Disadvantages

• It can be very time consuming to design and create webpage/sites
• It can be costly to run your own server to host these websites
• You have to maintain it yourself.
• Requires knowledge of HTML and CSS to make an effective site.

Activity 701: Using lists to produce menus

http://powell89.pbwiki.com/f/ListNav.html

The above links shows the slightly altered list CSS . I’ve changed the CSS so that the mouseover changes the background of the links to yellow and its text to red.

Activity 402:Building a usable/accessible web site

http://powell89.pbwiki.com/f/indexCSS.html

Activity 401a: Finding out about usability or accessibility

The first website I found came up with Seven points which make for good website usability

1. Good First Impression
2. Friendly Image
3. Easy Navigation
4. Useful Content
5. Appropriate for Audience
6. Clear Contact Information
7. Good for Search Engines

The next website goes into more depth about certain aspects of good usability. Boiling it down into 3 Sections:

• Content Basics
• Visual Design: Fonts, Colors, Layout, Basic Interaction, Design and Accessibility
• Genuine Value: Useful Content & Critical Interaction Design

See this link for further detail: http://www.usabilityinstitute.com/reviews/criteria.htm

Activity 302: Learning about CSS

This activity expanded on my knowledge of CSS.

I have learnt how to use the <span></span> to edit the properties of a section of text within a <div></div> tags.

The Hover function which is used to change the color of the link text has given me a new way too style any text links i have, instead  of just using the standard blue colors.

Activity 301: Advantages of CSS

• Removes the need to use a large amount HTML in order to specify design aspects of the Web page
• It Leaves the HTML to purely handle the content aspect of Web page
• Classes and ID  tags allow you to specify your own styles for specific sections of HTML.
• It allows you to manage multiple pages with one external style sheet.
• Style sheets can be dynamically exchanged so that content can be displayed in a variety of ways.

Activity 204: Good Web Design

The website below is one i have been asked to build for my guitar teachers business:

http://www.muzos-rock-academy.com/index.html

It uses a basic colour scheme which incoporates Blue, Black, Shades of Grey and White into the design. White Text is used on the grey background to provide a nice contrast, using this dark grey as the background appears to provide easier readability than just a plain black background, and causes less strain on the eyes.