The Key to Websites: Getting It Right

With our final project of making our own website on the horizon, it is important to know the ins and outs of creating a successful and effective site for both yourself and your users. As with many aspects of communicating we have discussed, Chapter 2 of Janice Redish's text "Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works" deals with 7 steps of understanding your audience. As the article states and life supports, people react differently to differnet websites based on a number of factors. For this reason, it is important to understand your audience before creating the site. The 7 steps are briefly listed below.

- List your major audiences
- Gather info about your audiences
- List major characteristics for each audience
- Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stories
- Use your info to create personas
- Include the persona's goals and tasks
- Use your info to write scenarios for your site

The step that stuck out to the me the most was gathering the audiences' questions, tasks, and stories. Seeing that we are creating websites that hightlight our resumes and work, and will be sending them to future employers, it is important for us to gather from people with experience questions they will be hoping to answer. Knowing what employers are looking for will help us to write in a language that pleases the audience as well as answering the right questions.

In Chapter 3, Redish gives advice on creating a successful home page, the jumping point for the whole website. Home pages need to be attention grabbing, well organized, and easily skimmable. In using these "five major functions of home pages", I hope to make my home page of my website appealing and useful for audiences. Here are the 5 functions Redish lists.

- identifying the site, establishing the brand
-setting the tone and personality of the site
- helping people get a sense of what the site is all about
- letting people start key tasks immediately
- sending people on the right way, effectively and efficiently

I hope to acheive all these functions positively by giving my website a personality that reflects my own. I also hope to create a home page with tabs to send my audience to my resume, writings, and personal bio. The Redish article was very helpful in giving great advice about creating a website.

What is the most important aspect of your website going to be? What tone are you looking to create for your website and what will it help you acheive?

Chapter 2 and 3

   As a consumer of information, it is easy to see obvious differences in Digital Media and Print Media, such as the way we access the information , the way the information appears visually, and the production that goes into creating it. Until now, I have never taken time to dive into researching both the differences and similarities in how we, as authors, publish our thoughts in both the Internet and print realms to appeal to the most readers and gain their trust in what we are saying.

After reading Chapter 2, I found it comforting that while the world is changing around us at rapid speeds, there are still clear guidelines - Communicating, Organizing, and Interpreting - to writing in whatever outlet that must be followed to make positive journalism. Seeing that the true essence of writing isn't changing even though the outlets are makes for a comfortable link between the past and the future.

   As a member of the generation that is torn between the print media that marked our childhood and the digital media that dominates our teens and current lives, I can't help but have love for aspects of both of them. I enjoyed the way in which the book pointed out positives and negatives of both, such as the way traditional print media can have stronger credibility due to the time put into it while blogs and other online forms of journalism proudly boast the voice of the individual, something large print companies have to dance around.
   I have mentioned in past posts that I am far from what you would call a computer expert. The content of this book, especially the sections on credibility and readability vs. "scan-ability", were incredibly helpful to a blossoming blogger. The internet, wether we like it or not, is changing the ways in which we think and process information. I now feel I have the knowledge to make my posts, videos, and images concise yet interesting and brief yet informative, keeping my readers active and engaged. By simply looking at the world around us, it is clear to see that these skills will be the ones we need to succeed in the future. I wonder though, what skills will be lost or stamped out if the world of print continues to be taken over? Will the ink and paper skills we once learned be any part of our children's future? 

   As we also discussed in our last class, it is important for many reasons for companies to have effective and user-friendly websites. For example, I might shop more online at Target.com if I felt their website was functional and useful. Chapter 3 in the textbook embraces the evolving technological world and offers great support in all the areas of creating a website that I never knew before. To me, my view of websites was simple, I either liked it or I didn't, never really taking time to think about why. This reading on writing style, tone, layout, etc. inspires me to learn more about successful pages to be able to get my thoughts across in a way that captures peoples attention. In the hopes of gaining as much blog advice as I can, I ask, what catches your eye first about a webpage? And once you are hooked, what keeps you coming back for more?