JoeF

One of the presentations that stand out clearly was Neil Garcia’s Exquisite Leisure Site. The numerous jokes he made were actually funny ( a lot of people who make jokes during a presentation fall flat) and made him memorable. As a straight man I am ashamed to admit that I have had the same idea to create an engagement ring completely out of a gem stone, although I was thinking a sapphire at the time instead of a diamond. Neil going through and telling the course of events that might happen during one of his super expensive trips was also a nice touch.

Another presentation that stood out for a number of reasons was Joe Posada’a gaming site. One, my name is also Joe, two, I am also a gamer, and three, the idea of a site for Dallas gamers was interesting to me. Joe describing how he wanted to focus on Dallas or even more specific areas like certain streets was interesting. It was also cool to hear him talk about how he was originally going to focus on things like local restaurants or shops before coming up with gamers. It was also fun to hear him talk about the gamer groups he is in and what they are like.

Ken Landefeld’s presentation was another with it’s moments of humor. Him talking about how horrible it was working at Target with that cartoon to go along with it was funny, even though I like Target. Ken’s presentation also stands out because it is the only slide presentation that I can remember. If I remember right he had to do slides because his site didn’t work on macs, although one of the guests at the class was able to bring it up on his mac. I’ve started to become a DC Comics fan to so seeing his Green Lantern model was cool.

I think blogs are a combination of broadcasting and community tools. It is the company or organization that write the blogs, which can be a means for the company to make announcements, give important news, or have individuals talk about what their working on. In other words it is a means of broadcasting. However, users can subscribe to the blog, leave comments on posts, and get in contact with others that either love or hate the thing they are talking about. All of that helps to build a community among the users.

A company running community tools is hard. First, you have to have enough content updated frequently enough to both attract and maintain a user base. Then you must provide adequate means for the users not just to contact each other but members of your organization. For a strong loyal community, the people in charge of the site have to be willing to allow members to complain or be reasonably negative when something goes wrong, which is hard goes no one likes taking crap even if they earned it.

Like most of the class I don’t think Twitter or Facebook are communities even though they probably have communities about them. They are both community tools that allow people to connect online, discuss things, and form groups around that subject. I have absolutely no account or connection with Twitter at all. It’s not that I have anything against twitter, it’s just I never had to use it before, and I don’t see the need to go out and look for it. I do have a Facebook page, but I never use it or update it or whatever it is your supposed to do with it. I only ever bothered to get one friend whose named popped up when I created my page. I guess I just don’t see the point of it.

Apparently I forgot the post for my task 7, sorry. For task 7 I did my contact form. It is pretty basic but I didn’t have that much time to work on it.

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/contact.htm

Project Presentation:

For my final project, I plan to discuss my homepage, along with the page detailing my work in Interaction Design. My sites objectives are basically to get me a job in the videogame industry. The audience for my site then is the people in the human resource department for these companies. To appeal to those people, I designed my sight to look sleek, modern, and professional. My site shows off the variety of work and skills that I have done relating to art and technology, the same skills that might be needed in the industry for a number of jobs. I found it very easy to get my content onto the site and to get it published, however, WordPress would keep moving my content around after I published it. When I finally got WordPress loaded onto my server, it only came with one other theme. But, it was very easy to find WordPress themes online and download them onto the WordPress I had on my server. There were not any plug-ins that my site really needed, I just placed two plug-ins onto my site so the sides wouldn’t seem so bare. One of my pages was a contact form, and that was the one page where I went in and modified the code. I took some of the code that I did for another project, tweaked it so that it would fit for my site, and then placed the code into the HTML for my site page. Since my website is running on a sever with free hosting, I will most likely leave it up and running as long as it is not costing me anything, and if I am making enough money when that point comes, I might pay to keep it going if it is not to much. When I have more free time and more content to add, I might improve my site.

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/modeling.htm

This time out I created a page displaying some of my assignments related to modeling. Most of it is from my modeling classes, but one part from my virtual environments class.

For this task I made a page to showcase my Interaction Design project. It goes through the different phases of the project from planning, to rough sketches, to research, ending in a sample screen of the GUI we made.

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/interaction-design.htm

For this page of my site I showed screen shots  of three different game modules I have worked on and gave explanations of what the projects were and my role while working on them

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/game-modules.htm

This is my photography page. Here I show a number of photos I have taken for various classes. Included are pictures form my “What is important to you” Photography project, A landscape that I did that I really love, and images I took during a football game in the stands, no easy task.

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/photography.htm

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/websites.htm

Apparently I forgot the blog post for Task 2 when I did it.

My first task was making the homepage. I talked a little about myself, my education, my family, and my love for videogames. I also uploaded a picture of myself.

http://sokarred.yourfreehosting.net/joe-freeland-portfolio.htm

The personas I created for the assignment awhile aback were basically businessmen I wanted to hire me. There are two possible reactions to my website that good be good. One, since I want them to hire me, is a calm, cool reaction, that they experience a sense of professionalism. It would also be good to show creativity, so if the user experiences a sense of wonder or amusement that can be beneficial too.

Besides colors and textures, other things that can produce a response is font, images, a interesting layout. My favorite color would probably be black. Black does kind of go along with the serious/professional feel that I am going for so it could be a good color to use.

The words I would want associated with my site is professional, polished, serious, energizing.

The most important part of my site would be the examples of my work. They are the point of the site and the main thing that would get me a job. Other important elements would be my resume and contact information.

The aperture theme is one that I like. It is nice and clean which goes along with both professional and polished (http://www.woothemes.com/demo/?name=aperture). The sections are nicely divided while at the same time the content is big enough to see or read easily. Productum is another theme I am interested in (http://www.woothemes.com/demo/?name=productum). It is another theme that uses the dark colors that I like.  Geometric isn’t a great theme that I wouldn’t use (http://www.woothemes.com/demo/?name=geometric). The blue that they use is very drab a boring. While the ‘content’  does provide some color, the actually theme is muted and boring. The orange highlight things the theme has does liven things up, and orange and blue do go well together, but the brightness of the orange contrasted with the dull blue is startling, which isn’t the best response to a site.