Planning (and building) the site...

So, after all the planning and cocking about, it was time to build a website - which turned out to be a lot more effort than it seemed. Even though I had everything planned out, if that plan needed changing even in the slightest it meant changing the same thing on every single page.

The biggest problem was the program - Dreamweaver. Because of the nature of the templates we were using, we were limited in how much we could change the layout of the site, as well as having to deal with all Dreamweaver's quirks. For example, when trying to remove the borders from buttons used as links, the box you need to check to show the borders is empty but the borders still show - you need to put a '0' in the box to get rid of them. Confusing? Yes. Annoying? Incredibly.

And then there's the problem of changing the colour of different aspects of the site - the background, the font, etc. I don't know how it happened, but at one point the page I was working on ended up looking like this:


Still, I persevered, and eventually things started to look a bit better:


After that, it was fairly plain sailing. Expect one last update soon....

Weeks 5 - 9: Experimenting with ideas

After weeks of research, we moved on to experimenting with ideas for the design of our websites. This largely involved using (read: messing around with) programs like Photoshop and Fireworks to create buttons and, more importantly, editing photos to make them more web-friendly (see the examples below).

Next we had our first (or maybe second, I can't quite remember) encounter with Dreamweaver. Using basic templates, and hastily-designed headers and buttons created with a rudimentary knowledge of PS and FW, I eventually managed to make a wesbite that looked like this.

Thankfully, my actual website looks better (and isn't written in Latin). It'll be finished and up on the Internets for all to see by Friday, but expect a few screenshots in the meantime, along with a couple of shots of what it's looked like at various stages of its development.

Weeks 1 - 4: The Research

First of all, we looked at different websites to decide what we liked and disliked about them - for example, whether or not it's easy to find what you're looking for, whether or not you have to scroll up and down or side to side etc.

My example was music website Drowned in Sound, which used to be one of the better websites around in terms of content. Sadly it's now full of pretentious, arrogant, elitist arseholes who hate every band that's ever appeared in a magazine or been played on the radio, but the layout is still - in my opinion - very good. Unlike a lot of websites it doesn't complicate things, and it's incredibly simple to find what you're looking for and whereabouts on the site you are (particularly useful if you've arrived at the site from Google or a similar route).

After this, we moved on to online research. This largely involved being given a variety of names to find various details for (personal phone number, address etc) with varying degrees of success. Unsurprisingly, the level of success was increased when using "search engine optimisation" techniques documented by Jakob Nielsen. The following week's class also focused on Nielsen's words of wisdom, this time as we experimented with writing with the web in mind - something which went so well I may well include the feature I wrote on my final website.

Next up: Experimenting with web design...

Online Journalism - Year 2

Ok, this is long overdue, but here goes...

In September (blimey, really, REALLY overdue...) Online Journalism 2 began. The assessment objective this time - to create a personal online portfolio of work.

Naturally, as it's now very nearly December, my own website is coming along quite nicely and is not far from being finished. However, I'm not going to let that stop me blogging on the process of making it, or even the research that came before that.

Stay tuned, viewers.

Trent Lott

Former US Senator Trent Lott ended up resigning from his post as Senate Republican Leader in 2002, largely thanks to numerous blogs. This is what happened:

1. December 5th - Lott attends 100th birthday celebration for former Presidential candidate Strom Thurmond, who is basically a good, old fashioned redneck/racist/typical southern American. He essentially based his campaign on a racial segregation platform.
   
2. Lott then says that the US would have been better off if Thurmond had become President back when he ran for election in 1948.
3. December 6th - American press coverage makes no real mention of Thurmond's comments, despite fairly obvious racist connotations
4. December 6th - 9th - Bloggers worldwide discuss Lott's comments, causing the New York Times to take another look and discover that it isn't the first time he's said something similar
5. December 10th - New York Times picks up the story, revealing Lott's previous comments
6. December 20th - Lott resigns as Senate Republican Leader
   

Group Blog Evaluation

The aim of our blog, Student Realities, was to try and open people's eyes to the realities of student life. One of the most important features of the blog was that we had six people posting at different times of the day, which is one of the advantages of the online platform and something which you wouldn't get in a print publication focusing on the same subject.

There were no real difficulties either in setting up the blog or in posting. The biggest problem was probably finding something to write about every day - because we were covering such a broad subject (the life of a student) it sometimes took a bit of time to decide what exactly to write about, and I think if we had discussed what we were each going to write about before the blog went live the actual posts would have taken a lot less time to write (and the occasional frustration of not knowing what to talk about would have been avoided).

We also could have put a bit more effort into the design of the blog and made it look a bit nicer with more pictures etc, but the problem with posting pictures was that we were all trying to remain anonymous and the pictures could well have given away our identities.

39th Round plans show Richard hasn't got a Scu-by

Ever since the Premier League announced its plans to investigate the possibility of playing a 39th Premiership match abroad, anyone and everyone involved in English football - from supporters to club owners - has talked about little else. Of course, there are arguments for and against the plans, and we're not even remotely close to discovering the specific arrangements for when, where and how the games would be played. And even at this early stage, there are people within the game (such as Sunderland manager Roy Keane and Birmingham City co-owner David Gold, to name two) who are hailing the scheme as the future of football. However, the simple fact of the matter is this - it's a rubbish idea.

Richard Scudamore, the brains behind the whole operation, has said that the motive behind the scheme is to take Premier League football to the world for the benefit of supporters abroad. But it isn't. The idea is, in fact, to make even more obscene amounts of money from English football by using fans in countries where, previously, it was only possible to get a bit of cash from million-pound TV deals. Countries like Australia and Japan, whose own football associations have even said that they don't want the games to be played there for fear of damaging the progress of their own domestic leagues.

Anyone would have thought that the Premier League got the impression that English supporters just don't spend enough of their hard-earned following their team anymore. Truth is, they couldn't be more wrong. My beloved Tottenham Hotspur, for example, sell out virtually every home game each season, in every competition, and have done for almost as long as I can remember. Up and down the country, there are supporters who haven't missed a game their team has played since about 1952. And the thing is, just because these people have travelled the world supporting their football team since before Mr Scudamore was a glint in his mother's eye, doesn't mean they get any discount. Oh no, they still have to pay full whack, just the same as those of us who only go to one or two matches a season and, as sad and obsessive as it may seem, they'll continue to do so until they just can't afford it anymore, purely out of love for their team.

But that's just Premiership supporters. What about the lower league clubs? It's widely acknowledged that the gap between the Premiership and the Championship is bigger than it has ever been and growing all the time (just look at Derby County's league record this season), and this is largely due to Premiership clubs receiving more and more money and, as a result, clubs in other divisions making less and less as each year goes by. The Premier League is the richest league in the world, has the richest clubs and the best paid players. The Championship, on the other hand, is falling further and further behind, along with the teams who stay in the division for season after season because they just haven't got the money to compete with the bigger clubs and their millionaire businessman owners.

The Premiership is rich enough - instead of finding ways to make it richer, Scudamore should be teaming up with the heads of the Football League to try and prevent the inevitable scenario in which the Premiership breaks away from the Football League forever.

Amateur by Lasse Gjertsen - A YouTube Review

Modern, quirky and undeniably cool, Lasse Gjertsen's videos are the kind of thing that YouTube was made for. In Amateur, the Norwegian relies once again on the frantic editing style used in his first big YouTube hit, Hyperactive (in which he uses millisecond-long clips of himself making bizarre noises and facial expressions to turn himself into a human beatbox), this time using a drum kit and piano to take the place of bodily functions.

The concept seems simple enough. But it's the execution that has made Amateur such a success. Watching the video, it's hard to know what exactly to compare it to. You could argue that it's a music video - it is, essentially, a video of a man making music. But calling it a music video somehow just isn't enough in an age when music videos are largely just marketing tools to sell pre-existing songs and albums. You could call it a showcase of talent, but that simply makes it sound like a guy with too much time on his hands showing off to millions of people around the world that he's never met, when it somehow comes across as being so much more substantial.

It is, of course, a fantastic display of technical ability, both in terms of editing and musicianship (though Gjertsen claims he couldn't play either piano or drums before making the video - something which is hard to imagine given some of the drum sequences in the video). But what's even better is that Amateur so far has over 7,000,000 hits. SEVEN MILLION. That means that, in just over a year since it was uploaded, more than 16,000 people a day have taken three minutes out of their lives to watch guy in his early 20's with silly hair making music one note at a time, with a camcorder. And he isn't alone - a YouTube search using the terms "Lasse Gjertsen Amateur" brings up page upon page of of video responses to the original, and even a few results from users who liked the video so much that they've (dubiously) uploaded the video themselves.

At the moment, Lasse Gjertsen may seem like something of an Internet phenomenon. In 10 years time, videos with viewcounts as high as 7,000,000 may well be seen as the norm, providing YouTube and other UGC-based websites fulfil their potential to to change the face of video media the world over.

Who's Online in 2008?

Well, 2007 really. Some useful sites for net usage statistics:

UK Government Statistics - Very handy for finding out who's using the Internet in the UK and what they're using it for. Not porn, apparently.

PEW Internet and American Life Project - Similar to the above, only with the focus on the whole wide world rather than just the little island we call home.