Restart and Re-boot Yourself

Blog Post 10 REVISED: Comment on the information architecture of the site you have chosen. Are there places where the organization and layering could be improved?

Working in conjunction with the leaders at my church, I've actually already begun to question and deconstruct the architecture of the Spiritformed website.

The first thing we noticed is that we really do not have a central hub or main page set up for all the ministries that fall under the Maranatha name. There are ministries that go on at Mankato State as well as St. Cloud State that uses the Maranatha name, and we need to figure out a way to include those in to the main website.

Building on what I asked in class, I've also decided that a home page icon is really not necessary, especially if everything falls under one "group name" such as Maranatha. In terms of architecture, that one main page then becomes the central page that everything else attaches to. To visualize this, imagine a box in the middle of a page that is connected by solid lines to say 4 other boxes, with maybe 4-8 boxes connected by solid lines to each of those individual boxes, but with shaded or "cut along these lines" lines connected to the main box.

Make sense? Because the current set-up really doesn't. It feels like a bar system and not a connected system.

Looking at the Spiritformed website, we can see the very tiny headings a third of the way down the page: Welcome, Who We Are, What We Believe, Attend, Contact Us, Sermon Archive, Ministries. Redish points out that good web writing is like a conversation, and most of these links are labeled as if they were a question a person would ask of a church member. However, the Welcome link is really just the home page (which shows up in the URL as "index"), so that could be relabelled to just say "Home". On most other churches' websites, the Attend link would instead be called the "Services" link or would just be included on the homepage.

There are very few illustrations on the Spiritformed website. The home page has an image of the actual church building; the Who We Are page contains the same building image as well as a picture of the pastor and his wife; and the Attend page has a rough graphic of the geographical location of the church, as well as University logos for various ministries throughout the state. The pages are designed to provide information but fail Redish's "grab and go" philosophy, as you have to hunt for what you want and nothing really grabs your eye other than graphics.

Looking over this website more thoroughly, I notice how there seems to have been no style guide created for this site. Nearly every page has it's own distinct font, and no boundaries and margins are set for each text or graphic box. Under the Ministries page is a rather unique text box where you scroll over each word for a different definition; horribly out of place.

This site needs work.

Continuing the theme begun in our class, and with some hesitation and transparency on my part, I've decided I want to redesign my church's website for our final project, because, in my opinion, Christians design some of the worse websites.

A brief disclaimer: while I am a Christian, and will defend Christ and Christianity, I am frequently ashamed not at my beliefs but at how others have abused those beliefs and treated other people. Because of these people and others like them, I am frequently relectuant to profess my faith, even though I believe in it strongly and wish others did. Some have given Christ and Christians a bad name, but I'd hope that by my own life others would see that we aren't all that bad, and Jesus ain't that bad either. At all times I am careful to not proselytize, and I have my own disagreements even with the church attend, nevertheless, I do attend a church and have been granted the authority to make significant changes to our website.

(All of this is a long way of saying that I am uncomfortable doing this but see it as necessary and an excellent way to fulfill this final assignment. I'm willing to be vulnerable to accomplish this neglected for too long task.)

The first thing you will notice about Maranatha's website is how odd the placement is. It is as if the window was designed to fit a certain screen resolution and physical size, yet even then everything would be offset to the upper left. There is an excessive amount of white space, with a large graphic of our building being the dominant eye grabber besides the Spiritformed logo up top. The fonts are all nondescript and unremarkable. The links are all small, and also appear to not properly align with the actual hyperlink under them; you have to click slightly above of "Who We Are" to actually go that page, for example.

Clicking "Who We Are" leads to a text heavy page with the reused building graphic and a picture of the pastor and his wife. There is a lot of reading on this page that most users will not be interested in. At the bottom under the graphic is our address and a link for a map. The "What We Believe" page is full of arguably necessary text (there are a LOT of denominations and various belief systems out there), but laid out in a weird way that is different from the rest of the website. Consistency wasn't in the original designer's mind.

Finally, the "Ministries" page is interesting, almost as if the designer was just playing around (he was). Each "link" is in a different color, same font, and you can highlight the link to see a text box pop up next to it.

Obviously this website needs a lot of work. There actually are some high quality Christian websites out there, doing some really interesting stuff, but this one is horrible. Redish points out that websites need to have a basic template that the entire website follows, and the space should be used effectively, using patterns and alignments. (Reddish 127-157) Spiritformed.com has a lot of work that needs to be done, but should make for interesting final assignment.

And don't get me started on having a separate website just for podcasts alone...although that is a good example of what limited web design I knew before entering this major.

I'm not entirely sure if YouTube and Podcasts change our understanding of what "writing" on the web is. Granted, there are some YouTube videos and Podcasts that are written out ahead of time, but most of it is off the cut, so would follow under the category of rhetoric more often than writing. Then there are some YouTube videos that appear to be scripted but come across as not, and are often strong arguments against free speech.

Rhetoricians tell us that the big difference between the Greeks and the Romans was the written word; Plato himself strongly hated the writing, believing everything should be spoken and memorized. The written word has long contained a power that speech simply cannot match, although speech can be extremely powerful in the short run.

Can we claim YouTube videos or Podcasts are a form of writing? Perhaps some are. But most aren't. Blogs are writing. Online newspapers are writing. Even the comments left on a picture on Flickr are writing after a form. But video isn't really writing, except when it is. Neither is audio, although writing certainly goes into some examples.

I'm torn between wanting to just lay down a universal law and declare "THIS IS WRITING AND THIS ISN'T!", but I hold back because I'm just not entirely sure...and there are times when writing isn't writing as well: "He who shall, so shall he who."

It's interesting looking over the case study Redish supplies for this week. Often when we come across bad web design, we notice it, but don't really understand why. It is helpful to learn that there are specific reasons why certain websites look and work better than others.

It is difficult for me to come up with examples of bad home pages, since most websites I frequent are cutting edge in terms of usability and innovation, and it feels cheap to just focus on some amateur's blog as a bad homepage. Most businesses have gotten around to reenovating their homepages; Google is most helpful for this assignment.

Perhaps a website that suffers from content overload may be the CBS Sports website. Little Steven's Underground Garage is a great example of "setting the tone" of your website. However, that can backfire, because a tone does not necessarily make good usability; catchy fonts obscure hyperlinks, epecially the size of the link. Most hyperlinks should consist of a box surrounding the text or in some cases be the text itself.

Live 365 is another site that does a good job sending people on tasks right away, but is not geared for the older less experienced user. Tasks are labeled and identified in a helpful way, but they assume a user's eyes are good enough to read very tiny text.

Using a Google search for "bad homepages", I came across this website. It fails across the board. The tone and personality is instantly offputting as a bad 80's commercial trying to be fun; every link has the exact picture over a plain text link; you cannot start tasks until the website preaches to you; but the website is effecive in sending people on the right way...away from the website.

For pure comedy value, I present to you The World's Worst Website.

Jakob Nielsen argues that people rarely read every word of a webpage, choosing instead to scan and pick out individual words and sentences. I would agree with this, but I think it needs to be more fully thought out. For example, when you are reading a book, every page is different and unique except for a few things: a chapter title or book title is usually on every page, as is a page number. The same can be said for most web pages; there is repeated data on each page, as well as a bunch of small texts on the bottom of each page. Nielsen's article in particular has hyperlinks at the top of the page that experienced web users will automatically know are there and so will skip over unless that information is needed. So to make the statement that readers rarely read every word on a webpage or written page is true, but that is the norm and not something that must be bemoaned. No one reads every thing.

I tend to be a linear reader, and yet due to the complexity of the readings this week, I skimmed a few paragraphs in Bolter. School has taught me to be more nonlinear in my reading; many professors actively encourage a skimming of the texts they assign, possibly because they can then assign more pages per day. On the other hand, I've had professors who assign 100+ pages of reading a class period, and truly do expect you to read it all and retain it, because that is how it was in the '50's when they were in school. This merely points out the dyslexic nature of the university educational experience.

However, when I'm reading for myself, I am very linear. Rarely do I jump around in my reading; occassionally when reading something on the Internet, or a work of fiction that gets overly repetitive and descriptive (such as Tolkien). I recognize that authors craft an experience carefully, choosing words and phrases that logically form an argument, even if it's just a dialogue. As such I almost feel obligated to read in a linear fashion in order to fully understand and appreciate what the author is communicating.

Almost. Sometimes I just don't care.

In our technological driven age, where electricity is a necessity, and boredom easily sets in when we are not driven by multimedia, many would consider the simple "book" to be an outdated technology that will slowly be replaced by e-readers and "the cloud" of computing. But therein is the problem; we are making a base assumption about our future. We assume that things will continue and progress as they have been; that computers will continue to grow more powerful; that bandwidth will increase; batteries will increase in storage; and that our world will continue to have a steady supply of energy necessary to run and power all our little gadgets and tools.

But should we be so quick to assume that? At any moment, we are mere seconds away from going "dark", being cut off from the Internet and local power grids. Things happen; for example, a hostile nation could choose to detonate a nuclear device in our atmosphere, plunging the United States into an electromagnetic darkness, instantly frying circuits. I'm not saying that we should live in fear, but that no man knows what the future truly holds. It has been calculated that the rate of information humans produce roughly doubles each year. Most of that information is being stored on computers, external hard drives, and the Internet.

But look at the wonderful technology that is the book! Books have no external powersource, don't need to be recharged, and are not so expensive that they cannot be loaned or gifted away. Books have limitations: they need light in order to be read; you cannot add new information to most books; and you cannot interact with books as you could a digital text. The book is a form of technology that has been steadily improved on since it's conception but has basically remained static. Books are directly responsible for newer technologies such as the Internet.

Bolter mentions that the early Christian church chose to switch from papyrus to codex to store their writings because the codex could contain more information (Bolter, 78), and many others followed suit. Nowadays we have begun to digitize everything because of the vast storage that is available to us. And yet we still have a Library of Congress, books continue to get published, the dictionary and encyclopedia are updated each year, and the phone book is published. But we all mainly use Google Books, the Kindle, dictionary.com, Wikipedia, and search engines. Yet if you take away the portal that is depend on other factors to function, we grudgedly resort to using the printed version.

The Internet and computers have been a great contribution to humanity. The wealth of information obtained and distributed through it as enormous! And the irony is not lost that this blog post is being written digitally as well, although it's not the instruments that define writing (see "The medium is the message", McLuhan). But a hundred years ago, and maybe a hundred years into the future, the book will still be around, still be the chosen medium for storing and obtaining information, yet much information gathered during the golden years of the Digital Age will have been lost.

So as Google Books continues to digitize every book every made, to our benefit...print out a copy of those books you find most precious, for your grandchildren's benefit.

I believe technology can drive and determine the way we think, read, and communicate, but I do not believe that it necessarily has to. To use a personal example, I've noticed that in my own mind I start thinking in terms of Facebook or Twitter statuses, similar to how people will start mentally composing a letter they know they need to write. I've also been using an RSS Reader for the past two years, instead of manually going to each blog that I read in order to check to see if nothing is new. With technology, we prefer all communication to come to us on our own time schedule, as opposed to whenever it arrives. We now read when we want to, which for most people, is whenever. The compulsion to read our emails or RSS feeds is worse than the need to read a newspaper first in the morning or the mail in the evening.

Sherry Turkle, in her Forbes article, implies that "We communicate with instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticons. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not intended to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling." Technology to a large extent has changed how we relate to ourselves as well as to others. Turkle refers to a woman who thought her life had ended when her Blackberry died; in similar fashion, my Macbook Pro won't boot up right now, and I definitely feel that my life and GPA are tied to that machine. All homework assignments as well as homework schedule is stored in one place that has been intermittently backed up. In technological jargon, I'm a weeping frowny face screaming "OMG!!!!1!"

Communication in this technological age is both a refinement of what has come before as well a degradation. We are able to succinctly say our point, but when it comes to casual communication, we all of a sudden lose all grammar and rhetoric skills. The Internet is a madhouse. The art of an argument has been loss THROUGH THE SCREAMING CAPS KEY. Because of this, many people, myself included, have become more comfortable conversing through a keyboard than in real life. It's something that will have to be dealt with in coming years. Research is needed.

And yet people are still awkwardly getting together and making babies...

Throughout human history, various inventions have refashioned their predecessor in new and unique ways. The scroll gave way to the codex, and the codex to the book. Nowadays we have the Internet, which is undeniably the most advanced technological form for language. But without its predecessors, the Internet could not exist, for the Internet is the culmination of print, television and film, and radio. But the Internet has done it one step further by introducing hyperlinks or hypertext.

Hyperlinks are embedded links within a text or graphic that will send you to another text or graphic. If you are reading an article on the Declaration of Independence, for example, and you click the hyperlink embedded on the date "1776", certain websites like Wikipedia will then send you to a separate article telling you every important event that happened in 1776. Bolter points out that many argue that hypertext "reflects the nature of the human mind itself - that we think associatively, not linearly, hypertext allows us to write as we think. (42)" "Literature is a system of interconnected writing." This breaks down the rigid linearity of writing and allows us to gleam the widest possible perspective on the topic of our choice if we so choose to.

Hypertext and hyperlinks are similar to footnotes found in scholarly articles, but have much broader usage within the Internet. Many items of great importance can only be found through extended hyperlink search; it allows a person to fact-check each source that is put forth. Hyperlinks have also re-envisioned advertisements on the Internet, with pictures and graphics allowing instant access to an online retailer or customer satisfaction survey.

As with each new wave of technological invention, we are compelled to develop for the new and exciting while reevaluating the role of older technology. The Internet may be the future as well as our present, but the fundamental ways we utilize this technology will by and large reflect what has come before.

Hello! My name is Stuart Blessman, and this in my introductory entry to my class blog, "Restart and Re-boot Yourself!" The first person to identity the source of my blog title gets to leave a comment!

I'm a Scientific and Technical Communications major with a minor in Communication Studies, taking this class primarily because it's a requirement for my degree but also because I enjoy taking classes with our instructor. I've also been writing informal blogs for the last few years, so hoping I can bring a bit of experience to this assignment.

My thoughts here on this blog tend to be my own but informed by classroom materials. Looking forward to writing more in the future!