Our lonley room

The water taste like water. The dark room is oddly shaped with ballet dancers running everywhere. Full of clutter; a catch-all room with sound-proofs rooms inside. A dusty, old feeling with hell just beneath our feet. It smells old and stale and the singing noise is getting louder. Fortune cookies are within our grasp as we walk around in this dark, closed-off room with artificial light. . . . and old pianos.

farewell to intestinal tracks

At this moment I am trying desperately not to throw up on my laptop but between body shakes, cofing up a lung and trowing up my entire water weight it is not easy. SO if you can , tell me what i have missed, thank you.

Website Types

Visceral level
http://www.delicious-monster.com/ - Very good color choice and graphical layout. Makes the viewer feel pleasant.
http://www.hollisterco.com - Good color choice, simple design and soft feel.
http://www.bungie.net/ - One of my favorite and most visited sites, very well designed and well organized.

Reflective
http://area.autodesk.com/ - Good design, establishes a style and is consistent.
www.nissanusa.com/ - Simple design, keeps focus on vehicles.
http://www.newegg.com/ - Clean design, very easy to navigate.

Behavioral
http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/main.htm - example of bad website
http://www.ishipress.com/666.htm - bad design long white page with no organization.

Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective Websites.

• Visceral level

Cute (the penguin), comforting (circular shape), simple:
http://www.penguin.com/index.html?redirect=

Appealing to all things cutesy and feminine:
http://www.cuteoverload.com/

Soft colors, little butterfly image (it makes me feel good):
http://www.besweetproducts.com/

Made me want to turn away before I even downloaded the plug ins:
http://www.doom3.com/

Honestly, I love this author, but the weird black on red thing kind of makes me want to turn away:
http://tanyahuff.net/

Beige... My initial impression was that it was smooth and inviting. I think they did a good job on appealing to people's want for comfort:
http://www.olivegarden.com/

It appeals to my inner need for cute... The Hitler part is kind of awkward though:
http://www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com/cgi-bin/seigmiaow.pl

• Behavioral

Slow loading time, obnoxious flash:
http://flasharcade.com/

Crowded, boxy, somewhat confusing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Dark colors, kind of a haunting feel (but it's a place to play games and watch videos... odd):
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/

Cheesy, bland, and... information about snakes. Too much information... :
http://42explore.com/snake.htm

Loading time, poor color choices... boring:
http://chris.pirillo.com/

WAY too crowded. As if the IEEE mark wasn't scaring me away to begin with:
http://www.smalltimes.com/

Clean enough, black vs. white website... gets the job done, don't feel much towards it:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7635018

Black vs. yellow, eye-catching. Interesting pictures (if not weird pictures):
http://www.paramore.net/

The separating boxes kind of make me feel strange, disconnected (much I like I feel while reading some of his books):
http://www.raybradbury.com/

He's smiling in his picture, but I'm not smiling at his beige page. His books is far more interesting than his web page:
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/levitin/

Plain... green... I'm beginning to wonder who makes author's pages. They're far more boring than the books they write:
http://www.philip-pullman.com/

Very colorful. Maybe they're trying to tell you that organic food has better coloring than veggies filled with chemicals:
http://www.amys.com/

• Reflective

Somehow, even the fact I have to download a plug in for this page reminds me of Nike; slow, not that cool, and so overrated:
http://www.nike.com/index.jhtml

(Okay, a brand only I know... but!) Relatively organized, lots of links (that lead where their supposed to), good products and prompt replies (yes, I have bought from this site before XD):
http://dollmore.net/

Slow loading, at least the design is nice. I've heard positive and negative things about Toshiba, so I'd vote their website makes them look a bit better than they actually are:
http://www.toshiba.com/tai/

Clean, pretty and cute (everything I think about when someone says Nintendo):
http://www.nintendo.com/countryselector

Loading time is okay, and you know there is always going to be something funny:
http://youtube.com/

Slow loading time... I'm not surprised really considering how slow they publish books. The main page seem a bit busy:
http://www.tokyopop.com/

Cutesy, but really it reminds me more of a Myspace page than a company that publishes books:
http://www.advfilms.com/

Black and boring. Maybe they were going for professional. I suppose they succeeded. Once you click in, it starts looking much more like I feel it should (like a gaming company... with pictures of their games):
http://www.square-enix.com/

Note: what Google first brings up is a direct link to their shopping page:
http://www.att.com/gen/general?pid=9147&GUID=30f96392-bdd9-4aa6-8dd7-287a01fa092cGUID=30f96392-bdd9-4aa6-8dd7-287a01fa092c

But their real website is much more, "oh look around first, THEN buy stuff!" Of course, maybe this is also to tell the people who are already their customers that they can pay their bill, or whatever else they need to do:
http://www.att.com/gen/landing-pages?pid=3308

Dear God, why is the loading time so awful?! My page keeps spazzing ou... it won't even finish loading. I don't have bad impression of them from their commercials (but I would after this site):
https://www22.verizon.com

"When you're here you're family." My family isn't that into beige, but okay, maybe we can put some pretty pictures on the beige walls:
http://www.olivegarden.com/

Visceral, Behavioral, and Reflective website reviews

Visceral: http://www.drewstruzan.com/ is a very pleasing site to look at. Soft colors and nice images. www.poptarts.com I think is an unpleasant website that makes me nervous when i look at all the flash. www.barnesandnoble.com is an effective website with colors that are easy to look at. http://www.fredfrap.com/ is just a stupid website that you cant read or look at without having a nervous breakdown.

Behavioral: I think www.wikipedia.com is a good example of slow loading time. There are no annoying flash animations, however, it still loads slowly. www.ign.com has many things happenning on the front page, but the loading time is short. You do have to ckick on the same link twice to get to a story. www.adobe.com is slow to load the front page. www.autodesk.com works simple and easy. the colors are easy to look at.

Reflective:I like www.amazon.com because the overall website is easy to navigate. Another website is www.filmtracks.com. There is mostly text here, but easy to look at and easily navigable. www.dell.com has a small, but simple and effective website. www.ebay.com , I dont think is well laid out.

website types

VISCERAL
www.poptarts.com- It is a flash choked child's website.
www.timecube.com-It is best described as a lunatic's website; with its meaningless ramblings it makes it hard not to partially agree with anti-net neutrality lunatics.
www.pixyland.org- Visit this site and if it doesn't invoke negative visceral feelings you do not have a pulse.
BEHAVIORAL
www.flasharcade.com-It is a very slow to load website.
www.timecube.com-Is formatted (long continuous text) in such a horrible way that it is the standard barer of the bad website.
REFLECTIVE
www.barnesandnoble.com-It is a great site that has all the latest book and independent & foriegn movie releases, searches if said item is in a person's local B&N store and holds it for you or ships it to you for free (if the purchase iS >=$25). It is easy to navigate.

Home Page Effectiveness - Apple

The Apple.com home page is effective because it is easy to navigate and the information is organized in a way that people who visit it often can quickly find what they need. New visitors to the site can also efficiently locate the desired information by using the intuitive search and navigation bar that is logically separated. On the main page there is links to the newest products and news items, along with a headline feed to alert the reader of any current updates. The small links on the bottom of the page are very useful but usually not even seen by most visitors. Overall the site is effective to most visitors because it is strait forward and simple to use.

www.bestbuy.com homepage

Best Buy's home page is organized very effectivley. I can see how it can be a little clustered, but for the most part is easy to navigate. All the navigation buttons are at the top and just below is a search engine, and a "new this week" article. This lets the viewer know about sales and discounts on their products. You can access your account from the front page and track your order you made on the website. Gift card purchases are availiable as well. The colors (blue, white, and yellow) are not too strong, yet stay true to the Best Buy stores.I found nothing too confusing about bestbuy.com. This is a good example of a front page, because everything on the website is accessable right in front of you.

IBM Home Page

http://www.ibm.com/us/
The IBM homepage provides a simplistic and compact interactive environment. All links are self explanatory, pertains to the information reported by their name, and are stored away in ether drop down menus or tabbed categorical folders. Repeat users are afforded the ability to register with the site in order to provide for a more personal experience. A search engine is provided for ease of navigation. The colors are tasteful and calming.

Dell

http://www.dell.com/

This homepage makes it easy to see what their page is all about and the links are clear to see (pictures that are labeled! How convenient). Plus there is a pop-up window above each of the pictures: allowing you to choose if you want to buy for a corporation or for personal use. For those who are repeat users, or have ordered things before, the login field is available towards the top. The page fits the screen and does not seem to be constrained to a "certain" size. Color choices for the page are appropriate, not bland, but not distracting.

And who can beat the big ad in the middle "Technology that makes an impact." They even know how to advertise well.

Seven rules for developing web site content.

1. rollingstone.com offers plenty of information. In fact, the site looks much like a news site; like msn.com. Information is offered on politics, music, movies, the superbowl, movie stars and gossip. The site has the information that is published in the magazine, but also a section labled news in the past three days.
2. rollingstone.com is very organized. At the top of the page, are tabs for news stories on artists, blogs, reviews, etc. Below are more news stories, mostly music related, more reviews and video reviews that i found interesting.
3. The formatting issues seem not to be a problem. The site offers all the copyright information at the bottom of the web pages.
4. There are some user-friendly patterns, however, the pages on rollongstone.com can be too long sometimes.
5. Rollongstone.com seems to use the correct formatting and programing. The layout is easy to navigate and objects are assembled nicely.
6. I have not found any gramattical errors at any part of the website. Rollingstone.com is written much like the magazine and looks less like a web article.
7. The site is well maintained and up to date. The news stories are arranged like the magazine, and also stories that has happened in the last three days.

web version of rolling stone

Rollingstone.com
1. There is no printer-friendly version of the text that I can see.
2. When clicking on some articles from the front page, it takes you to another page of all the articles, then you can access the news story; others take you directly to the article. Once on the page with the story, you usually have to go to the next page to read on about the story.
3. When I searched a sentence from rollingstone.com, nothing came up that matched the article exept rollingstone.com

Publication analysis& rule adherance

www.pcgamer.co.uk & www.pcgamer.com
1. Yes, there is a link at the bottom on the page
2. The text is on one page that allows the user to easily scroll though the article.
3. There was no such collation found. ______________________________________________________________________
1. This website offers relatively accurate reviews & previews of games that offer images and video of gameplay, as well as allow the audience to respond to the review in real time via a moderated comment posting system. Links the user to related game reviews within the gerea. Links to online retailers providing the game are also posted.

2. This website is also well organized. The site provides an orderly list of links to various portions of the site on the left side of the page. Several scrolling tickers displays the current issues top stories on the top of the page. A search engine for the site's massive archive of game reviews are also provided.

3. All pertinacious information regarding site ownership, copyright ownership and publication/upload dates are found in both the header of each individual article as well as the footer of the site itself. Site index and homepage link is provided along the left side of the page.

4. Information is processed into easily digestible chunks in the body of the texts. The articles themselves are ordered by genre (which can very from time to time) and then sub-ordered by how hight they rate in gaming satisfaction.

5. The site displays correctly from a number of browsing platforms (IE7, Firefox, Safari, ect.). It does not use RSS to allow readers to subscribe for up to date information.

6. The staff of PCGamer is well known for its wit and journalistic integrity (will withhold rating until a complete (gold) version of the game is in their hands and played to its completion). Grammatical and spelling errors are nonexistent.

7. The site is maintained regularly, none of the links are broken. The site is updated in a weekly basis.

Exercise 3.1

Exercise 3.1
FashionDollQuarterly.com
1. There is a PDF file link, but it includes all the pictures and everything that was in the magazine. Not very print friendly, in my opinion. And, honestly, the columns archive dates back to 2005... and only 2005... What if I want something from a more recent publication?

2. It's a PDF document, so yes everything scrolls just fine, pages easily divided, one from the next (probably just like in the actual magazine... though I don't have a copy of it from 2005)

3. There aren't any exact replicas of their sentences: but that's probably because no one else is a leader in "doll fashion." To be honest, I only bought the magazine for the pattern in the back myself...

Rule 1: Offer something
I couldn't say I felt this website offered much of anything. Looking around, past articles are hard to find and information seems somewhat scattered in other places. Possibly the most annoying thing to me is the download section. You're offering screen savers... How about post a download to the latest pattern, or something else interesting? Screen savers is just a cop-out way of saying, "we have nothing to offer."

Rule 2: Get Organized
There is a sense of organization on the site, but it quickly becomes convoluted in navigation. The links are fairly self-evident (on the left), but I have gotten better results navigating from the skinny, hard-to-read navigation bar above the main box of information. This just seems like a poorly designed website, when at the bottom it mentions a "best viewed in" statement. It should be best viewed in any browser with any computer screen size: that's the point of a well-thought out website

Rule 3: Understand Formatting Issues
I cannot imagine how anyone COULD get to information outside of the front page. If they did however, the website is consistent page to page (with plenty of FDQ everywhere) that the lost user could navigate and know what page they had been to.

Rule 4: Create User-Friendly Patterns and Clusters of Information
This is where, if you can find an article, they've done just fine in. The main issue with their information is how little correlation there is between the magazine itself and the website. They seem like two different entities almost in their format and information.

Rule 5: Use the Correct Formatting and Programming
I would have to vote they did not use the correct formatting considering (again) that there is a "best viewed in" statement at the bottom of the page. If it's not versatile, it's not the right formatting.

Programming wise, everything seems to be working out okay, so I assume they got the right man for the job.

Rule 6: Edit for Perfection
Since it is a fashion magazine, wit and such is expected. I would have to say, the way they right is one of the best things about them (magazine and online). They're humorous and upbeat, and as of yet, I've not found any major errors.

Rule 7: Create a Realistic Maintenance Schedule
They have it, and they maintain it. Well enough... (minus the columns archive).

2/5/08 Class

I am not going to make it to class today. I am feeling a little under the weather. It would be greatly appreciated if you could let me know what I miss. Thanks

-Lawrence Polski