DESIGN

I think good and bad design of a website depend on a multitude of different factors. After the lesson last week and after reading Williams article, the CRAP acronym is defintily important. I like the idea that by using the basic principals of contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity anyone can simply webpage production. Unfortuanly, through my own personal I have found out that learning the correct "CRAP mix" is the difficult part. I think Alignment comes the quickest. When your looking at a website, elements that aren't aligned correctly seem to jump out at you. Same edge alignment is important. Also, when it comes to aligment I like how the Williams article says that a centered alignment must be a conscience placement. I always thought that a centered alignment was a "lemonade-stand-flyer-folly!"

Aside from alignment, borders are huge. There's nothing worse than logging onto some low-rent website and finding wood-grain borders or stainless-steel looking borders. I hate that. It's unprofessional and makes your website look like a 1980's Nintendo game. Less is more.

Anway, I think the best way to create a professional, clean website is to go by good examples. Many times I have found myself taking layout ideas from popular wesites. While it is hard for me to implement some of those ideas, looking at them still makes me realize what is good and what is bad

It's in a FLASH~ not really...

Flash design is a very helpful tool for enhancing your web page! It allows you to be more creative, organized and ability to impress your viewers with different graphics. In our webpage we are using flash buttons that start out dark blue but turn a murky green to represent flood water- so aesthetics play a part in flash- Other advantages include smooth transitions between pages and flash can make links to other pages VERY obvious- Flash journalism is practically just starting and the breakthroughs are only beginning with what you can and will be able to do- The only disadvantage I see is that it takes a while to manipulate the flash program to get exactly what you want on a page- In oour groups page we used buttons which when clicked on represented murky flood water color over a dark sea blue- This took a long time for one of our group members which leads me to believe its a difficult process- I am excited to continue on with flash and look forward to gaining more experience with it- I have seen some cool things it can do and hope to one day become a flash expert because it is just another great addition to this thing we call convergence journalism!

-SSliker

Flash woah

Flash Journalism

Flash videos and the like along with the Internet craze sites like youtube.com and others are revolutionizing journalism. Short flash videos, accessible on almost any computer are making the Internet the place to be for hard to find rare video that some citizen has snatched off their camera phone. Now graphics and website design and all the other great stuff that flash allows journalist to do aside, short flash videos are making the internet an open video forum for anyone and everyone who can functionally work a computer. What we are learning in convergence is how to capture and master the art of flash video and use it to our advantage as journalist. I am sure in future years that flash will become an even bigger part of the overall journalistic landscape and an important aspect in how people get their news. It is up to use as journalist to focus on this medium and evolve with it as to not be left behind.

Flash journalism

Though my exposure and experience with slideshows and rollover graphics is only minimal, knowing those tools are available to tell a story makes the group project more interesting to work on. I've definitely become more appreciative of slideshows since some of the video interviews I did with kids didn't turn out well. Instead, I had to use a mirantz so that way I could hold mike up to the kids mouth for good sound, but I was also able to have visual footage of the children by taking photos and putting it together as s slideshow. With flash we're able to be more creative in how we capture something. I also like the use of graphics in explaining complex things. I've seen graphics for health and science stories that work well for both print and online. This gives people the option to learn the same thing in a different way, which I think is important.

Flash

I won't lie; photography is my thing. There is something that is just captivating about still images and a person's ability to take their time to absorb everything in those images, as opposed to watching moving video. That being said, I've become a sucker for slide shows with audio. The addition of a single voice, or one track of music, can really take things to the next level. My best friend and I actually began crying watching a slide show of the Pulitzer Prize winning photographs. I think in that case, Flash is the means for a perfect combination of mediums. I'm sold.

Usability over accessibility flash

Usability over accessibility
In fact I didn’t think accessibility as quite big of a problem either, but it was one of the listed disadvantages in the reading, so I used it for my headline.
There are reasons, why we learned flash programs in class other then others that have been mentioned in the reading. One is it’s advantage on usability.
As the reading has mentioned in Chapter two, more then 90 % of the American user have access to the flash player, and even 44% of the Asian countries has program include flash player in their computer.
Even if one does not have a flash player in their computer, they can easy download one off the internet, and install it without even restarting computers. That might seem like a minor point when we are free. But as I heard from other classes, in the information overload age, people don’t have much patience to wait around. They want to click and get information that they want to see, and want to hear. And flash offer us that option.
Although we might have a bit hard time for making the search engines with the flash player that to us as journalists might be a little bit inconvenience. But our jobs are to search and collect information that should not be a problem to us at all.
After looking learning flash information from the reading, and from class, I really think that using flash has more advantages than disadvantages. I am glad I can learn it from class.

Flash

I think Flash is a very effective tool for multimedia journalism. Stories that can be interactive with rollover links and text boxes, as well as things like soundslides, allow for creativity on the journalists' end as well as the feeling of freedom of click on the user's end. It's a winning combination for both I think. Creating pages with flash seems to be something that just needs to be done as trial and error, see what works, what looks the best. But with some time invested it will be a really good thing to know how to use in the newsroom.