Our Websites Are Done!!

Having struggled all the way through this project myself and with Professor Arola canceling class in the spirit of our class's exhaustion, it comes from a place of utmost sincerity when I say

THANK GOD THIS PROJECT IS DONE (for now)

...and congratulations to my classmates for designing some pretty impressive sites. 
My favorite web text is probably Cassie's or Tai's. Cassie's is very clean and navigation is a breeze; Tai has great style with his graphics and links.

I furthered my knowledge of what makes an effective text during my research before and experimentation during this project, as well as through the texts that some of my classmates put forth.

Kristen Parton uses her web space to analyze the effectiveness of different video streaming sites. While her analysis is critical, concise, and specific, I found myself in want of a more user-friendly menu system -- one placed at the top of the page instead of the bottom, perhaps, since it took me while to find it -- and some proofreading errors distracted me from her message. I learned what made each specific site effective or not, but without a page of her own concluding/summarizing thoughts or analysis within each page explaining the relation between each site I had to interpret on my own. Her main stressor was the importance of layout and color in directing the viewer's eye and attention.

Ariel Popp's website analyzes web comics, specifically those based on real life. Her slideshow of (awesome!!) hand-made comics progress in a story-book fashion, with an intro and a conclusion and details in the middle that hit all the major points. Her visually appealing format makes it a pleasure to learn that the effectiveness of a based-on-real-life comic has to do with relatability; in other words, an comic is funny if the reader doesn't need a lot of context to understand the humor. In addition, web sites about based-on-real-life comics have to follow a format that allows the viewer to navigate easily and without too much distracting content on the sides (ie. ads).

AJ Robertson wrote his site to analyze ... well, I think it's to analyze websites about various video games... wiki's, I presume. Without an introduction or a conclusion, the site is a collection of pages that individually analyze one site at a time in a very orderly format. His parallel format throughout helps me link ideas together, and he addresses the established genre convention that each site does or does not follow. That being said, I understand what wikis are, but I am still not really sure why the texts are ultimately more or less effective after reading through his site.