The focus of Assignment 3: Web Presence Creation of the Web Communications 101 Unit of the BA Internet Communications degree was to create a web presence consisting of a central node and three interlinked nodes. This exegesis will discuss the decisions made in regards to the Web 2.0 tools selected for use in this assignment, the purpose of each tool and how each tool relates to the project as a whole.
I chose to create a blog as my central node due to their accessibility, ease of use and visual appeal. The ability to use RSS feeds and widgets to deliver content from other sites was also an important factor due to the requirements of the assignment. When considering the platform on which to design the blog, Blogger was selected due to my experience with designing on this platform as part of my work as an information technology support officer in a public library. Blogger’s user-friendly interface, highly customisable templates and wide support for third party products made it an ideal candidate for use as a central node (Stauffer, 2008).
The topic of budget technology was chosen as it is an area of interest that would be enjoyable to write about and a topic that would appeal to a broad audience of readers on the web. Technology based blogs are common on the web, but many of these focus on technology that is prohibitively expensive and beyond the reach of many people. The main theme of the blog is to demonstrate that it is possible to enjoy new technology while still being budget conscious. The contributing nodes selected for incorporating into the blog were Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and Wetpaint. Depending on their compatibility with the Blogger platform, their integration is in the form of an RSS feed or a widget.
When selecting the template, several criteria were looked at including the amount of columns, style and whether the width of the template was fixed or fluid. The blog uses a fixed width, 2-column layout using the Awesome Inc. template which was chosen for its clean, minimalistic style. A black colour scheme was used, as it was more effective at highlighting the key components of the blog. Where possible, the same colour scheme was maintained across the contributing nodes to create a consistent look and feel. A fixed width template was used as it allows the layout to be customised more easily and ensures that the look of the blog will be consistent when viewed at different resolutions (Knight, 2009).
Twitter was chosen as one of the social media components of the blog due to its popularity and effectiveness as a communication tool as well as its simple to use interface (Morris, 2010). Twitter would be useful for communicating ideas and thoughts with users as well as promoting content on the blog. As a contributing node, Twitter is particularly useful as it can be easily incorporated into the blog as an RSS feed or through the use of a widget. The widget was chosen for incorporating into the blog due to its visual appeal and its highly customisable template that could be modified to blend in seamlessly with the colour scheme of the blog.
Delicious was selected as the other social media component for its ease of use as well as providing a way to for users to gain an insight into the themes and background of the blog. Delicious also follows the Web 2.0 philosophy of promoting communication and knowledge sharing through the use of keyword tags. The ability to incorporate an RSS feed from a Delicious account into the blog also means that any updates made to the Delicious account will be automatically delivered to the blog without any duplication of content (Buckley & Clark, 2009, p.102).
Flickr is used as both a content sharing component and as a tool for hosting images to be used on the blog. Flickr provides a wide range of tools for uploading images, categorising images into sets and providing users with the ability to tag and comment on images contained in the photo stream. This allows users to tag images with keywords, creating metadata that will be useful for anyone looking for images on a particular topic (Anderson, 2007). From a technical perspective, Flickr is very suitable for use a contributing node due to its rich feature set, user-friendly interface and the ease in which you are able to incorporate a photo slideshow widget to display images from your account into the blog.
Wetpaint was chosen to create a wiki to store information used in the blog and to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing. The Wetpaint wiki platform is very easy to use, with an interface similar to Microsoft Word and also supports a wide range of third party tools. Although Blogger is a useful platform for publishing content, it provides limited tools for arranging the structure and accessibility of created content. The use of a wiki would allow content to be archived and arranged in a meaningful, coherent format and also provide the potential for users of the wiki to make contributions and corrections (“Wiki”, 2010).
The central node and contributing nodes designed for the web presence creation assignment were chosen for their ability to allow users to create and share content. Through the use of RSS feeds and widgets, it is possible to deliver content to users from a range of sources without having to duplicate content or visit many different sites (Gralla, 2007, p.127). Each of these resources compliment each other and continue the Web 2.0 philosophy of providing new ways of interacting and engaging with users (O’Reilly, 2005).
References
Anderson, P. (2007). What is Web 2.0? : Ideas, technologies and implications for education (2007, February). JISC Technology and Standards Watch, 5-53. Retrieved from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf
Buckley, P., & Clark, C. (2009). The rough guide to the Internet (14th ed.). London, UK: Rough Guides
Gralla, P. (2007). How the Internet works (8th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Que Publishing
Knight, K. (2009) Fixed vs. Fluid vs. Elastic Layout: What’s The Right One For You?. Retrieved from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/02/fixed-vs-fluid-vs-elastic-layout-whats-the-right-one-for-you/
Morris, T. (2010) Sams Tech Yourself Twitter in 10 minutes. Indianapolis, IN: Pearson Education
O’Reilly, T. (2005). What Is Web 2.0? : Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Retrieved from http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1
Stauffer, T. (2008) How to do everything with your Web 2.0 Blog. New York, NY: McGraw-HillWikipedia. Wiki. (2010). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
