Mithun Mathew – ATEC 3361

I guess the biggest difference between broadcast tools and community tools is that broadcast tools doesn’t allow feedback from the community.  Rather, it does what it says and the blogger, or who ever else, “broadcasts” to the community.  Broadcast tools most usually do nothing to nurture community.  Community tools make sure there’s feedback and make sure the community interacts.  You should use broadcast tools for blogs, podcasting, and email newsletters. For feedback tools you would use it for email feedback, and surveys and questionnaires.

I believe corporate blogging is a combination of both broadcast and community tools, depending on the company.  Some companies want feedback for their item and some companies just want to blog about their latest news and just want to let the people know what they are doing.  For a company to use broadcasting tools, they have to make the reader feel engaged with their blog/reading.  It has to make the reader feel connected  and should build personal relationships with the users.  For podcasting, the consumer or the person hearing, has to feel they know the presenter and experience a personal connection.  Successful podcasts have a big number of people following and start a community.

I have not added any community or broadcasting tools in my website, just because it’s showcasing a service.  Maybe later on if I decide to add a blog but for right now I’m just going to keep it simple.

Once I have my website done, I would like for it to give the audience a chance to contact us in order to schedule for a date.  That’s the main objective that I’m trying to get done for the website.  The intended audience is anyone who is doing a convention, wedding, or anything related to sound to help them achieve what they want with microphones and such.  My design will appeal to the audience because it has a calm teal color and also the black color which represents darkness, kind of making you think it’s in a movie theater with all the noise and sounds.  I picked the domain name because that is what my dad thought of at the moment.  This will spread because my father is making flyers and they will be going around in the area which will show the website and it’s services.

Wordpress was hard at first, but once I got used to it, it was pretty easy.  The themes were very easy to find, especially because it was free!  Once I have to pay for it, then it will get a tad harder but for now it was great looking for cool themes that fit the domains style.  Some plugins I used were the contact form plugin and also a tracking plugin to see how many people come to the site.

This class helped renew my skills in HTML and CSS.  I’m going to start read more books and research how to get better with CSS and HTML as college goes forth but I feel like this was a great first step to something big.  I actually did want to become a professional web developer but this class made me a little hesitant, but I think I can pull through if I work really hard on becoming a pro web developer.

Well for these tasks I had to write all the pages for the site.  This was pretty difficult because I started from scratch.  I’m still working on #6 because I have to photoshop some pictures and also take some more picture but it should be done in the next couple of days.  I’m having some problems with my homepage because it stops halfway through.  Does anyone know how to fix that? Do I just need to change some CSS to make my homepage bigger and longer?

I don’t know why I’m having difficulty doing this.  I’ve made the contacts page but I need to put the contents in the page!

I’m actually kind of irritated right now!  I made a logo and put it on my website at the lab, but when I went online at home to see my website my logo is gone!  I’m pretty sure its because I uploaded it from my desktop from campus, so when I get a chance I’ll upload it onto my website instead directly from the computer, which I think might have been the problem.

As of right now I’ve just uploaded the theme for the website and made minimal changes.  I have fallen a little behind so I’m not in pace with the steps but I will be in the coming days.  I’m going to start putting new pages up after I learn PHP files and learn how to change and make new PHP files.

I actually have somewhat of a clear picture of what my website will look like.  I already picked out the WooTheme, Productum, which looks like it can fit what I’m looking for.  Colors for the site will actually matter because one, I want the background to be dark/black because whenever you think of concerts or conventions, you think of no lighting (dark background).  For the secondary color, I wanted to make it a lively color, like teal.  Teal will represent how energetic the event will be.  My favorite color actually is blue,  I would do blue but I don’t think it would do great for my website.  And plus, blue is too original for websites now-a-days.

Once again I picked Productum because it looks like a simple site.  There is nothing too complicated about the site.  Again, the call-to-action is to call or contact us in any certain way.  At the top of the site, you can make different pages, which I will only need 3 or 4 to accomplish what I’m doing.

I chose the Google Blog because I thought it would be an interesting blog to review.  When I first looked at the website, it just looked like a regular, simple old blog.  Nothing that actually caught my eye, but that’s Google — very simple.  On the top of the page, on the banner, it says “Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture”.  This is great because it actually says what the blog is talking about.  When I look through the blog, it actually looks like some interesting stuff to read.  Some blog posts are talking about the Olympics, some are talking about their own product that is about to come out and so on.  The people blogging are also very engaging.  It’s not a regular newspaper that just tells me facts.  It’s actually someone who wants to talk to me and wants to tell me about their product.

Also as a scroll down, they do update daily so the regular user can come everyday expecting a post of useful information.  Right now, I think only one post a day is fine.  Later on, I guess it would be better to do a couple of posts during the day just to keep the reader more engaging.  The thing that caught my eye is that Google used Blogger to do their blogging.  I would just think that Google already had their own blogging site but blogger is cool anyway.  The domain name is very simple, googleblog.blogspot.com.  To actually get to the site from the main site, Google.com, I searched “blog” from Google, and it was the fourth/fifth site on the search results.  I actually could not find a way to get to Google.com from the Google Blog on the other hand.  Although there is a Google search on the top right side of the blog website, there still were no links to the Google site itself.  This website compared to others is what I said before, it’s not going to be complicated, telling useless information, it’s Google, they are simple and very informative.

In all honesty, I know sparingly about the design concept for the web.  In high school I did a little amount of HTML, but that was it.  I want to learn more of design because I know I can use my creativity here online.  The web sites I have reviewed have the best layouts for their site.  They are usually very simple and user friendly, which is what I’m trying to do with my website.  I want my site to look simple, but still have a sophisticated mix into it.

I do not know much about WordPress and all the other websites that go with it, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and the foundation of WordPress.  I would love to learn more about this so I can get the gist of things for design and these “Content Management Systems”.  I hope this will bring me to the next step for my final project and make it actually look decent and finally start something with web development.

I’ve already found a name and already hosting it on BlueHost currently.  www.rimixsound.com will be the site that I will be hosting information.  This name is my father’s side business for his sound engineering business.  Since my mother sang before for ceremonies and other various events, my father made sure she had a microphone and speakers and everything.  We have these huge speakers at home that we need to put in some use.  He has been doing this for quite awhile now, for about 8 to 10 years.  I’m hoping we can advertise this site using business cards and hopefully people can come to the site and call us to schedule a time to help them with their event.  It would be great if this will be at the top of Google when searched.  I just need this to be recognizable as possible so it’s easy for everyone to use and call us.