Web Navigational Structure

Web Navigational Structure

4 Principles of Good Web Design

Making a website is not hard, making a user friendly website now that is a challenge! 

The 4 design principles of making a Website are proximity, alignment, repetition, and contrast.  In order to understand these principles properly we need to understand;

How users interact with Web sites?

Eye tracking software shows how users are able to follow website design.

The Proximity here on the Fly Fishing Tackle UK site is very good as all the elements that relate to each other are grouped together.  As you can see here there is no odd spacing and all the space on the site is used very well.  

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Alignment can significantly affect the usability of the site and it can enhance or detract from the appearance of the site.  It is important to remember that a site that is lined up well will create a calm secure feeling.  Lack of alignment is the most prevalent problem on the web pages.

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Throughout the site you should repeat certain elements that tie all the disparate parts together.

Repetition elements that unify the entire site are:

• Navigation buttons
• Colors
• Style
• Illustrations
• Format
• Layout
• Typography

The repetition on this site would be the colour, shape of the buttons, thickness of lines and font.

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Contrasting elements guide your eyes into the page, create a hierarchy of information, and enable you to skim through the vast array of information and pick out what you need.

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Exploring the anti-social side of social media

A Los Angeles based journalist is taking part in an exhibition where she will live in a shop window for a month with social media as her only contact with the outside world.  She will be in the glass box for the entire month of November with Twitter, Facebook and Skype as the only ways to communicate with the outside world.  The rules of this exhibition that she has had to skype members of the press that are outside the window just to do an interview.  She is undertaking this challenge because she is sick of going out to dinner with friends that are constantly on their smartphones.  She is worried that people are just accepting all these forms of social media as the norm now and don’t even stop to think they might be bad for you.  The 3 things she misses most about the outside world are coffee, hugs and fresh air.  Prior to this challenge she has said that she had an active social life—both on and offline.

This initiative is all a part of The Public Isolation Project.  The Public Isolation Project consists of two symbiotic and simultaneous art pieces–Joshua Jay Elliott’s An Examinable Life and Cristin Norine’s The Future of Socializing.  An analog analogy of the contemporary experience of living in the Internet age.  

You can friend her on facebook, follow her on twitter, follow her blog and I’m sure she will be happy with the contact.

How to make 500 million friends...and alienate people.

 

So who exactly is Mark Zuckenberg?

If we learn anything from “The Social Network,” it is that there is no right or wrong answer.

Be it good or bad, “The Social Network,” certainly has caused extreme reactions.  Universal scepticism greeted its launch, which is a far cry from the Oscar buzz that now surrounds the film that has achieved a seemingly unattainable approval rating of 97% on the revered film review website “Rotten Tomatoes.” 

The movie follows Mark Zuckenberg, the only person in the world more socially awkward than the characters portrayed by Michael Cera, in the early years of what is now the most trafficked social-networking site on the internet. 

Aaron Sorkin, creator of “The West Wing” and “A Few Good Men,” based the screenplay for the film, in part, on Ben Mezrich's book “The Accidental Billionaires - The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”  Like the film, the book is a self-confessed fiction fest. 

The film traces the story of Zuckenberg and Eduardo Saverin, Zuckenberg's close friend at Harvard who was the sole investor in Facebooks’ infancy.  When the company began making serious money, Saverin was edged out by an offer he couldn't refuse.  The movie is centred on a series of legal proceedings and flashbacks that involve the company’s co-founders.  It is a dialogue-driven piece, sprinkled with a little humour about the worldwide phenomenon that is Facebook.

Zuckenberg is your quintessential nerd, known in his Harvard days for reciting lines in public from his favourite eight century Trojan war poem “The Iliad.”  Mark is a student of the classics and his personal motto is said to be Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, loosely translated as, “Maybe one day we’ll look back on all this shit and laugh.”  I believe Mark would do exactly that if he ever got a chance to see the film about his life that he half-heartily tried to stop it in production.  Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin doesn’t seem to have any affection for Mark as he paints him as an abnormal, off-colour, peculiar person that can’t seem to form a lasting relationship with anyone he meets.  Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Zuckenberg, doesn’t seem to think much of him either, as he is being quoted as saying he researched Asperger's Syndrome, which is a form of autism where suffers have high levels of anxiety and confusion, for his portrayal of Zuckenberg.  Zuckenberg has never had any form of this syndrome and it was merely the actor taking creative license to make the actor more interesting and weird with little regard to the facts.

In one particular scene that annoys me, Zuckenberg is seen acting like a spoilt child, who was just told global warming destroyed the summer season, as he is sulking in a meeting with an ad executive and in another scene he is doodling with a scornful look on his face while he is being sued for millions by his best friend.  It should be pointed out here that this is the man who donated $100 million of his own personal wealth to Newark public school system, one of Americas’ worst school systems.  This is the sort of philanthropy that we normally only see from the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and certainly not form a spoilt brat; frankly, it’s great to see someone so young as Mark to have such a compassion for his fellow man.  The cynic here could point out that he made this donation a week before the release of the film as a smoke screen as the film doesn’t portray him in the most favorable manner. The donation could also be aimed at counteracting any negative stigma that could arise from his newly acquired lofty position of 35^th in the Forbes’s rich list.  Upon closer examination you will see that this donation was months in the making.  The only reason he went public with his donation was because the heads of the charity convinced him to do so in order for them to obtain a slot on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where she announced to the world, “You wanted to remain anonymous and we talked you into coming on here." 

What really frustrated me about this film was we were lead to believe that if these guys just got laid more often we would never have had innovations such as Napster and Facebook – both of which are depicted in the film as being the reaction / over-reaction of a nerds attempt to overcome some unrequited love or failed relationship.  It is true that Zuckenberg did set up the site facemash.com  following his girlfriend breaking up with him but it is entirely untrue that his motivation to set up facebook was to become popular so she would take him back. 

In fact, he had a new girlfriend during the entire timeframe of the film and he wasn’t the hopeless loser that was jealous of his best friend Eduardo Saverin love life.

Here she is...... not bad :P

I believe that even if Zuckenberg had cooperated with Sorkin in the making of this film that not much of this film would have been changed as people don’t want to watch a film about a socially normal person that is down-to-earth and has lots of friends.  I feel that no matter what he was going to portray him as a “human stairmaster”, a frantic mess of a human being, as his girlfriend described him the first scene of the film.

So it's a shamelessly biased account, as well as a seductively plausible one.  What do you expect from a film based on the memories of those who claim he cheated them on his way to becoming a billionaire and backed up by transcripts from their lawsuits against Zuckenberg.

Meme

The term Internet meme is used to describe a concept that spreads virally.
A Meme is often a saying or joke, a rumor, an altered or original image, a complete website, a video clip or animation, or an offbeat news story.
An Internet meme is an inside joke, that a large number of Internet users are in on, these are very popular on sites such as 4chan.
Internet memes have a tendency to evolve and spread extremely swiftly, sometimes going in and out of popularity in just days. They are spread organically, voluntarily, and peer to peer, rather than by compulsion, predetermined path, or completely automated means.

The term Meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 popular science bestseller, The Selfish Gene.

Public relations, advertising, and marketing professionals have embraced Internet memes as a form of viral marketing to create marketing "buzz" for their product or service. Internet memes are seen as cost-effective, and because they are a (sometimes self-conscious) fad, they are therefore used as a way to create an image of cleverness or trendiness.

Marketers, for example, use Internet memes to create interest in films that would otherwise not generate positive publicity among critics.  Used in the context of public relations, the term would be more of an advertising buzzword than a proper Internet meme.  One common form of Internet meme is created when a person, company, product, musical group, or the like is promoted on the Internet for its pop culture value.
Popular examples of use of memes in film advertising:

300 – The film 300 originated a series of image macros featuring variations of the "This is Sparta" phrase associated with images of disparate situations, often superimposing the film's main character's face onto people in the image.  This has itself since been parodied with a scene from Spongebob Squarepants featuring an enraged Patrick screaming "This is Patrick".

The Blair Witch Project – The first film to use the Internet for astroturfing. Its makers spread rumors that the material they shot was authentic and that the three protagonists really disappeared in Burkittsville.

Brokeback Mountain — inspired many online parody trailers.

Cloverfield– Paramount Pictures used a viral marketing campaign to promote this monster movie.

Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus – The theatrical trailer released in mid-May 2009 became a viral hit, scoring over one million hits on MTV.com and another 300,000 hits on YouTube upon launch, prompting brisk pre-orders of the DVD.

Party Girl– First feature film shown in its entirety on the Internet (June 3, 1995).

Snakes on a Plane – Attracted attention a year before its planned release, and before any promotional material was released, due to the film's working title and seemingly absurd premise. Producers of the film responded to the Internet buzz by adding several scenes and dialogue imagined by the fans.

Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities, online multi-player gaming, and email usage.

Manifestations of Cyberculture include various human interactions mediated by computer networks. They can be activities, pursuits, games, places and metaphors, and include a diverse base of applications. Some are supported by specialized software and others work on commonly accepted web protocols. Examples include:

Virtual Worlds
A virtual world is a genre of online community that often takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment, through which users can interact with one another and use and create object. Virtual worlds are intended for its users to inhabit and interact, and the term today has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of avatars visible to others graphically.

Second Life
The most popular of these is Second Life. Here residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world.  Second Life has an internal currency, the Linden dollar (L$). L$ can be used to buy, sell, rent or trade land or goods and services with other users. Virtual goods include buildings, vehicles, devices of all kinds, animations, clothing, skin, hair, jewelry, flora and fauna, and works of art.  The Second Life community is diverse, dividing itself by language and subculture. The various groups often have very little contact with each other, separated not just socially, but since the advent of private sims, geographically. Significant social groups within Second Life include Steampunk, Furry, Gorean, and Vampire.

Guide to Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is one of the best resources for internet users to keep track of bookmarks, but it is also one of the best ways for website owners to market their site. Everyday pages that are on the front page of del.icio.us receive a few thousand visitors and gain a number of bookmarks from users.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs.

You have probably used the bookmarks or favourites feature of your internet browser. Del.icio.us provides the same benefits but in a much more efficient manner.
To start with, new users will need to create an account with del.icio.us (which is free). Once you have an account you can download a toolbar for your browser of choice. The toolbar will allow you to easily bookmark any page that you are on. So, when you visit a page that you think you may want at some point in the future, you can “tag” it to save it. Del.icio.us will then prompt you to add several descriptive one-word tags to categorize the page. The tagging system is a key to del.icio.us, as you will find when you want to retrieve a page.

Now, in the future when you want to find a page that you bookmarked, you will go to your del.icio.us page. On the right side of the screen you’ll see a listing of all the tags that you have used to save pages. By clicking on the tags you’ll be sorting the bookmarks to find only those that have that particular tag. So as you can see, accurately tagging bookmarks is key. Del.icio.us also has a search feature that you can use.
If you are using your browser to keep track of your bookmarks you probably struggling with the folders and keeping the number of bookmarks to a manageable number. With del.icio.us’ tagging system you can keep track of a huge number of pages without any problems. Also, your bookmarks are available in any browser on any computer.

Here is a video on how to set up an account

The web? TV but better...

Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web

Since this video was made it has been 1/3 of the way through the next 5000 days of the Internet and Mr Kelly certainly has left us with enough food for thought.  He was right on the money with his prediction of Cloud Computing and with GPS playing a bigger role in social media with the likes of Foursquare becoming extremely popular.

Kevin Kelly strikes me as someone at the forefront of web technology thinking, from a quick look at his blog and seeing (image below) it confirms to me that he has finger on the pulse of the subject.



With this in mind it leads me to rethink the old African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child", actually I think it takes the web to educate our young........Boom! :p

Is it really better to have all this easy accessed information...?

Make up your own mind..:P

Benefits of using social networking for students

Landing a top job is all about who you know these days and sadly less about what you know.  This fact won't be told to you by recruitment agents but if you ask anyone in industry I am sure they will agree with it.  This practise is common in China, it is known as Guanxi which is very controversial. 

How many students are every going to get the chance to meet the president of a large corporation? Try slim to none.  This is where the likes of Linkedin comes in, You start by talking to their friends. You ask your associates if they know someone who is connected with him, and on and on.  You connect with company and build a relationship with them before you meet them.  Here is a step by step guide to landing a job via Linkedin:



In case you didn't see the epic Oprah special on Twitter recently, here is a great video on how to utilise the site.


Social Networking - Twitter from Stephen Baugh on Vimeo.

The personal benefits I feel that twitter has is being able to connect to people that are currently discussing areas of your study and so being able to connect with them and form solid business contacts.

Connect with me please =)

Twitter
Linkedin
Xing

and sure you might as well be my friend on Facebook too :)


Having said all that, consider this!!! =)