Module 2 - Analyzing and Designing a Web Site
Types of Content to Include
One of the biggest differences between writing a paper and creating a web site is the opportunity to use multimedia in the web sites. Multimedia can be defined in many different ways, but for this course, let’s think of it as items that go beyond text. Images, sounds, movies, animations – these are all examples of multimedia. These items can make your presentation come alive. They can add interest. But most important, they can make your presentation more effective than 20 pages of text.
Before you decide to use every possible type of multimedia, it is a good idea to analyze a few things – what type of multimedia files do you have now, and what will you need to create? Your available skills and resources should also be taken into account. If you decide you want to have an animation to illustrate a concept, but don’t have the skills or resources to create the animation yourself, what are you going to do? When analyzing the multimedia content you want to include remember to keep grounded in what is possible and available to you in terms of skills, resources, and time.
One type of multimedia that meets the test of having the available skills, resources and time to produce yourself are images. Images are the easiest multimedia files to include in a web site. You can find them on the web (Google Image Search is a good start), or you can create your own electronic images by using a scanner and some image editing tools. It is expected that images will be part of your web site.
Other types of multimedia (like sound, animations, movies) can be incorporated into your site, but there are some limitations. The resources and skills to create these files are significantly higher than the skills and resources needed to create images. For example, do you know how to use Flash to create animations? If so, do you have a copy of Flash? Also, there are file space limitations in the public.www folder. One problem with other types of multimedia is that they can begin to take up a lot of space on the web server. We need to use our web server space wisely to include the basics first like text and images, and then we can start to add other types of multimedia as space permits.
We are not trying to say that you should only use images as the multimedia files you include in your site, but you need to realize that there are hurdles and limitations when you consider other multimedia files. If you have any question about different types of content that you would like to include (or build yourself), please see Dr. McClurken or Jerry Slezak early in the design process. We will try to help you clear the hurdles.
Other types of content that could be useful in your web pages are charts, tables and graphs. Making data available in visual ways can help you to clearly present information that is technical in nature, illustrate trends, and provide the basis for conclusions you make. Sometimes it is easy to forget about these items, but they are very valuable – whether used in your papers or web sites.