More on Web Aesthetics

Aesthetics on the web is an interesting thing. I believe it is more about relationships than about beauty or how pleasing to the eye something is. Let me explain. The internet is functional so it needs to be practical to use, it is limited by technology so it needs to conform to standards, it needs to contain content or it is pointless and all this needs to be legible to people can see it easily. Aesthetics on the internet is the relationship between these factors.

Form + Content + Function = Aesthetically Good

All factors must be present and they must all also compliment each other and that is what makes good web aesthetics in my opinion.

Good Web Design Ideas
What Makes a Bad Website

Visit Spying?

So I know that you can monitor the visitors to a blog for all kinds of things. Here are a few graphs of my blogs stats. I have now noticed some limits to statcounter.com. Firstly it does not keep on record all visits only the last 30 visitors are recalled for detailed analysis and even for total site visitor it will not generate graphs longer than a few months long. I wish I had of known this earlier as I would have not used this service and looked for a less limited one.

Flickr allows to a certain degree for each account holder to see who has been visiting their images. Flickr allows users to see how many times images have been viewed and can also see any comments that have been written about them.

The Blog Watcher

It is useful to collect information about visitors to your blog because you can know if other people are reading what you are blogging and what they are reading. Blog writers like to know how many people visit each day, are they repeat visitors, how much do they read, where they come from and where they came to your blog from. Also getting an idea of the other blogs they frequent enables a blogger to understand what their readers are into.

I have had a counter on my blog for a few months. I use Statcounter.com because it was one of the first on the google search found and offers lots of feedback about visitors in an easy to understand way. I have had almost 300 hits on my blog in the time I have been using it. I think they mainly come from my MPI104 class at university which is why I created this blog however some have come from Technorati. I also found out that some come from France, China and Italy. Most stayed for less than five minutes and most only looked at my front page, so I should make the links to past posts more accessible.

All About Technorati

Technorati is an interesting service to blogger and blog visitors. It enables users to track the popularity, viewer-ship and links to their blogs. One of Technorati's features is its ability to search blogs registered with it. This is very helpful providing relevant and accurate results. However it is not just a search engine it is as said before a tool for blog users and writers. Users and aggregate blogs they like and topics they want to read about. It also allows bloggers to give brief information about their blogs and a profile of themselves. It is different from Google in that it is specifically for blogs and provides additional feedback.

Blog writers are able to monitor their blogs in terms of 'authority' which measures the links to the writers blog from other blogs. The higher the authority the higher the rank. So the blog with the highest authority has the highest rank also. At the time of writing my authority is 5, not too good but its early days!

Good Web Design Mystery

What makes a good website? Is it the overall design, functionality, legibility, speed or navigation. What makes a good website is a combination of all these factors and one that cannot be totally understood, the 'X' factor as some call it. Lets look at a these points to get an idea of what would make a good website.

Overall Design
Is it visually pleasing? Does it make you cringe? A good website should look like it belongs together and do so in harmony. Imagine a 4WD with 5 inch wheels, a 16 cylinder engine with a rag top. Pretty stupid idea. Same thing applies to websites. Each element, the menu, text, links and media must all fit together into an appropriate package for the aims of the website. Websites also need to take into account the fact that not everybody has the same size screen and the site should work on a variety of common screen sizes.

Functionality
Does the website do what it needs to? Does it do too much? Is it easy to use? A website must function in a way that aides the user not just permits them use. People need to be able to search for things on sites and refine these searches. Buttons and links should be straightforward and totally functional. The functionality should also be unified. All buttons should be similar.

Legibility
Is the text readable? Are the colours distracting? A website needs to convey information or it is useless. The text content needs to be clear and not a strain to read. Titles need to be understood at a glance. Many website allow users to change font size according to personal taste so each user can make the website legible for their needs.

Speed
Does the site take a minute to load? Are there videos and animations on every page? Even with broadband becoming the norm bandwidth costs money and multimedia content still requires load time. Keep images to a reasonable size, let the user choose whether to watch a video or not. DO NOT play music on the home page and definitely DO NOT have a flash intro, I don't want to wait 30 seconds to get into the site.

Navigation
Can you get to right info fast? Is it the same throughout the site? Navigation is paramount for a good website. The user should be able to get where they want to go fast and easily. Navigation should also be clear so the user does not get confused.

X Factor
Its up to you whether you like a site or don't. Some people love black backgrounds while others like white...

The Pleasing, The Ugly and the Aesthetics

Aesthetics
Aesthetics is an interesting word. It specifically relates to the philosophic study of the way human sensors perceive things and the emotional responses that result. The area of study for example looks at why some things elicit emotions of disgust like a decomposing animal while others such as flowers usually give positive emotion. This idea is very pertinent to web design as users want aesthetically pleasing content to view and web designers and programmers want to be able to provide an aesthetically pleasing web experience to their users. An interesting note about aesthetics is that different cultures have different ideas of what is aesthetically pleasing. These differences can be seen in architecture, art and what type of human features are considered pleasing. When taking about aesthetics in reference to the World Wide Web the functionality of the content must also be considered because of the functional purpose and nature of the Web.

Wiki site on Aesthetics


A Pleasing Website
A website that I find find pleasing is Apple.com. This website is both nice to look at and highly functional. The site maintains a common theme throughout its various areas and is both easy to use and highly functional. I have found that accessing the various areas of this website requires less navigation and the navigation is more intuitive. The text is very clear and the menu system takes up minimal area. The website scales well onto my large widescreen display allowing me to take full advantage of the enlarges screen area. Importantly most of the high level screens contain few images to speed the load process and when media is integrated it is seamless unlike many other websites which have weird embedded players that feel out of place. Pages on the site that are updated regularly have very nice history interfaces as well. In terms of look the website in minimalist with black text on white background. Apple.com is a great example of a visually pleasing website that does not skimp on functionality much like Apples OS X.

Ugly Website
An example of a ugly website would be HRODC.com. I am not going to comment on the content of this website but focus on it terrible aesthetics and prehistoric functionality. Firstly the colours, speckled grey background with bright red text boxes filled with crammed white text and over six different fonts and a bit of bright yellow for good measure. This site makes use of the most annoying and useless html feature; scrolling text, the most annoying of which tells the site visitor t scroll down to see the vast mass of links and tables which make the front page about 10 000 pixels long. No one in their right mind would care to navigate to the depth of the front page let alone seek anything further inside. This website does not take into account its users. The website is also very hard to understand because of the lack of unifying design. With no common design ideas each section is ordered differently and behaves differently. Not only is this website creating a terrible impression on anyone but it could definitely loose the company business.

Print vs Web Aesthetics

Aesthetics applies to both the print and web mediums. Where as print is purely visual the web is visual, audible and functional. The addition of sound and functionality make web aesthetics so much ore complicated than print aesthetics. In print when you are finished you are done but the web is constantly updated and upgraded. New images, video, audio and text are constantly being added. Web pages are in a sense like an artwork that will never be completed.

Here are some websites giving some more insight.
Print Design vs. Web Design
Web vs. Print Fonts
Word Processing: Print vs Web Documents
Digital Aesthetics

Google Reader is My Choice

Google Reader was my choice for RSS aggregator becasue I already have a google account and quite frankly I am sick of the 000's of web accounts for each individual service. Google has a good reputation for easy to use, reliable and feature rich services. So in conclusion until a universal web identity is established I will be trying my best to never open a new friggen account.

XML and RSS and other internet abbreviations

XML
XML stand for Extensible Markup Language. It is a general markup language. Markup languages are essentially a programming language which contains text and information about that text. XML is a free to use language that enables cross platform compatibility of web content. Applications can also be inplimented within XML by adding semantic constraints. XML is used in XHTML and RSS feeds. More information about XML can be found here at Wikipeida.

RSS
RSS can stand for Rich Site Summary or more commonly Really Simple Syndication. RSS is used to provide feeds of updates to the rapidly changing web based content such as blogs, news and podcasts. RSS is a family of web formats used for this purpose. RSS is based on the generic XML format mentioned above. These feeds can be subscibed to by programs called feed readers or aggregators by a user and so the user can see any new content since they last checked. RSS is very iimportant because it enables rich content like podcasts to be subscribed to and the latest episodes downloaded. It also enable new or interesting articles to be identified quickly and simply. RSS allows advanced web functionality demanded by the growing group of web 2.0 users. More information about RSS can be found here.

My First Assesment Post

Well here it is the final blog entry before my assesment. It is a little scary but I have learnt a whole lot from my experience with blogger, flickr and del.icio.us so far and I can't wait to learn more this term. Firstly I will address the question of interestingness. I thinnk this is a very subjective term and depending on you and your interests anything may have any level of interestingness. Overall I have focused on television production and some aspects about it. I think I have made some interesting points on my Blog and shared some interesting sites through del.icio.us. Flickr has enabled me to share some of the photos I like with my friends especially those ones from productions and assignments.

In my blog I have completed 15 blogs posts (including this one). I have worked steadily over time and covered a variety of areas both related to my blog aim and some random ones. I particularly like this one on Supervillians and this one on the real Homer Simson. I have extensively used tags for my blogs as well as pictures and links. I was very pleased to work out the Ink Roll, counter and Technorati things which are on my blog. I have also looked at the different templated fiddling with font size type and look to achive the modern low key look of my blog. Relaxed corperate I call it. I like commenting on others post that I can relate to like this one on Candy and this one on Music.

Next up is my flickr account. It took me a little while to get around the idea of just looking and exploring images but I really like it now. I have several contacts which whose images i regularly look at an sometimes comment on. I have joined a group about Television Transmission and there are some images I find really interesting and with another classes assignment about broadcast envrironments the images helped to visualise more complex environments. I like benig able to show other people my images and especially the landscape ones from the helicopter and around Wollongong. I feel that this site is a great way to easily present a visual portfolio or happy snaps to far off friends and family. I like this picture from skindogg86. It was good to relect on some good times in the TV studio. The image tags really help finding the right image and I have used them extensively. The batch tools were very helpful for processing my images.

Finally del.icio.us has been very helpful for me as a tool for my assignment and to keep track of those weird sites you find from time to time. I used it to track some of the websites I used for research and it really helped for checking the back on information and confirming references. I also was able to use it to forward websites to some of my friends that wanted to know where certain sites were. The tagging this was gold here and realy helped to organise my links and find other I might be interested in. Bundling is super good. I have about 40 links but have used many more from networks. It is really interesting to see what other have found on the net.


All these wesites have helped me in some ways but I think I need to work more on integrating them into my daily workflows to get the most out of them. It's good then that I have another term to do this.