Re-search

when doing re-search i looked at some of the top internet guru's opinions on the internet and web design.

the webpages are;
ben shneiderman;
http://faculty.washington.edu/jtenenbg/courses/360/f04/sessions/schneidermanGoldenRules.html

jakob neilson
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990530.html

they underline some of the most common and some uncommon issue's with the internet in which they give a set of rules in which they believe makes a good website user friendly. the majority of the issue's are general knowledge however ssome of them are more advances.

when creating my own designed website i will take into consideration some of the things mentions by them.

audience research

For my audience research i will be leaving polls on my blogger account and sending my account address out to friends, and peer's within my college who will answer these polls for me, i will be putting various types of questions up over the next few weeks, i am doing this to find out not only a demographic view of people but also a psychographic view of the audience i will be aiming my website design for a new tv channel at.

my polls;
one of my questions whas "what tv set up they had", in which i mean either they had sky or freeview, i asked this question because i believe they have a different type of audience, mainly because for people to recieve sky it means they pay for thier channels however freeview recieve them free, with freeview customers i believe they are the lower of classes simply because it means they are happy with the limit of channels they recieve, how ever thier's more than double the channels on sky and i believe these people are prepared to pay more to recieve a bigger choice and and in the case of some channels a better quality.

My second question was what type of tv channel the viewer prefers to watch, this was simply because i would like to know which channels the majority of tv viewers find interetsting and watch the most, i do believe the type of channel they watch reflects thier personality. In this poll i found that more people preferred to watch film channels, with music channels coming second in the audiences choice, this gave me the advantage of knowing what the audience prefer which means it's what would be best to work with.

The next few questions were about the type of film they watched and why they watched it. the majority of people watched comedy with romantic coming in at a close second. This meant i could get an idea of what makes people tick and what would make them watch this tv program, since comedy came in first this would be the the majority of films shown. this was followed by whether people watch a film by the year it's made in and whether they watch a film by what country it's made in/by, from these polls i found that the majority said no to both, with a few saying somtimes and very few said yes. from this i would say it's not a good idea to use this in the website but then it could be classed as a new market technique, and to get people to watch and recognise factors that make films different like the county and time era they were made there fors from this i am deciding to try this technique.

Next was a poll about the time the audience watch a film and who they prefer to watch a film with.
this slightly fits in with the what type of film they prefer to watch. the majority said they like to watch a film with just a partner/lover and also the 27% who voted said they like to watch a romantic film, a link? i would believe so.

The first initial idea was to aim this channel at family's but in this poll only 19% said they would prefer to watch a film with the family so this had to change my idea's. and aim it at the majority which said they would prefer to watch with a partner/lover.

Because i have sent the questions to my friends i know the majority age range for the answers and considering this i will also use this age range for my target audience, which is 16-21yrs. when i recieved my polls stats for the first two posts i saw that not many people had answered the polls, however from the people who did i gained the information that firstly most people owned sky more than freeview however in further research i found that most freeview channels were available through sky aswell, however this shows the audience would pay more to recieve more than just sticking with the limited channels.

After this problem with not having  many voters i decided to do drastic measures and get my whole college back including teachers. and this was a significant change in the amount of voters and gave me the feedback i needed.

history of web design

The history of Web Design.

In this essay I will write about the history of web design when it was first created to the point it’s at today, coincidently I will be using the web for research.

The internet began in the 1960’s. It was originally set up for US military purposes and scientists to communicate and transfer data to each other through computers using the telephone lines, for the 1960’s this was seen as efficient.

In the late 60’s and early 70’s some universities started using it. At that time the internet was specifically for exchanging important data between computers with the help of transmission control protocols. In 1969 a special Internet language was created, which was ARPANET and GML (General Mark-up Language). This way of communication was inconvenient and not user-friendly. Then in 1972, Ray Tomlinson created e-mail in which advanced the life of the Internet.

Then in the late 1980’s the internet was introduced as a means of communication for anyone with access to a computer and an internet connection, at this time one of the first freeware browser program called mosaic was developed  and became a very successful program, within the first year over a two million people across the world was using mosaic.

In the current situation there is a version 2, 3 and 4 and many other variations of web designs. The standards that are set by the W3C have made it very hard for large companies to create specific web browsers and develop a monopoly on web design codes. This is because if one company was allowed to dominate web design and browser technologies, it could have had a very detrimental effect on the Internet at the current.Shortly after the W3C was created, Microsoft released Windows 95, which featured a completely new user interface and a browser on the Windows platform, Microsoft Internet Explorer, which became very popular worldwide. A few months later, AltaVista, the first multi-lingual search engine, and Amazon.com, one of the first Internet companies to allow electronic transactions, were invented, and the World Wide Web began to grow rapidly. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like CSS were changed and provided more opportunities for web designers and web developers.

In 1996, there was the introduction of Macromedia Flash, with the introduction of flash its technology became a popular method to use to create animation. It was also used for various web page components and used to integrate videos into web pages and this further changed the face of the Internet. The use of Flash enabled designers to create interactive content with very little development knowledge, in its early versions it had very limited scripting capability. Flash continued to develop in the years following, gaining a scripting language based on JavaScript and other useful features that transformed it into a full presentation tool. Nowadays there are many web sites which use HTML entirely for Flash ignoring the fact that multiple flash elements decelerate the loading time.

Web design over the years has been divided into "different generations." The First-generation websites were originally text with very low graphics they; they contained a lot of text and used a linear layout. The size of the files had to be very small as the transfer rate was very small in which files were transferred using a telephone line or a modem. However the basic design of the first generation made it easier for modems to transfer the information in a small amount of time.

The Second-generation websites were more complicated, they had more available to them via html, In contrast to websites of the first period, the websites of the second period looked a lot more professional as they had new characteristics, including iconic images instead of words, buttons with fancy edges, banners, structural menu to present a hierarchy of information. The web sites created at this stage were over-crowded with icons, coloured graphics and backgrounds. Many of the site characteristics were driven by the development of technology that was constantly changing. An example of this is that there was need to adapt site designs to the certain screen resolution, so to 8bit or 24bit monitors.

The Third-generation website included colored backgrounds and animated images. And today’s web designs are classed as fourth generation, the Websites are vibrant and full of color.

Over the last few years XML, JavaScript and Flash have been just a few of the advanced techniques that allow each individual website to be completely unique. With the ability to use codes it means the ability to bring websites to life. As a result of the advance in technology, web designers can add interactive elements, produce videos or create games to include in any websites they design.    

World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C, was established in 1994. Their Goals and standards were set for the future advance of web design. The HTML was designed as the primary coding for any future web designs. The first version of html was limited but could be advanced.

This generation of web sites tend to be similar to the sites of the previous 3 generations with some distinctive features such as a large quantity of multi-media content and unique web–driven selling propositions, which can only be delivered on the Internet.

Nowadays the 4^th generation of web designs are developed for ecommerce, government, education, entertainment, business, etc. with the main purpose to meet the user’s requirements.

The term web design implies the great range of activities such as;
web site planning,
web site creation,
web site modelling,
web site designing,
web site coding
programming
professional arrange the pages.

Being able to professionally arrange pages make it a user-friendly and easy-to-use site. The Internet has not got a large history, but it has developed heavily over the past 40 years and has become the essential part of every person’s daily life.

1996 was classed as the year of a new era. For many designers it was also shown to be a shameful period mainly because they were not fully aware of how websites worked and therefore there was not a proper construction system established.

Here’s an example of a McDonalds website back in 1996 in which the MacDonald designers were told that their salaries will be increased depending on the amount of red and yellow they used. This was because the yellow and red was there trademark colors however they were seen as using it in an abusive way. It was said that red and yellow are vibrant colors but they should have look for different tones and make the visual weight more even.

Google emerged in 1998 and although it has change their logo since then, the main idea remains the same, which is to provide us with a clean and useful design which will always work efficiently. Google was one of the first search engines available to the public as a means of effectively searching the web.

Then came 1999 in which web Designers began exploring new visual characteristics, trying to take full advantage of all the programs they can put their hands on. Color was taken to a more serious level, they started designing with proportions and therefore they also began considering the importance of layout and visuals and usability rather than just a lot of colorful and animated icons on screen. They increased the presence of interface elements as links to make the experience a lot easier and visual.

Nowadays the website is used for many different reasons, such as music and video downloads and sharing, advertising purposes. But the biggest use of the internet to date is for large global companies to sell and distribute products all over the world, an example of the in amazon or play.com. In which are website used for entirely selling purposes.

To date the World Wide Web continues to grow with the number of web users growing. Every year millions of web sites are added. The History of web design is a history of the 21st century; therefore each of us has a unique opportunity to contribute to its further development.

The graph on the left shows the usage of the internet across the world.

brief

The brief for A2 media.

For A2 media I am going to create a new website for a new t.v channel, along with a newspaper advertisement for the channel and an animated ident sequence for the channel.