DoingMedia

A very web design-centric but good post here on the Web Design Process. It’s so close I can almost taste it!

The list of process steps are:

1. Know what you’re doing
2. Know what the site needs to do (Is this “Goal”?)
3. Know what the site’s visitors want (When did we figure out who the “Audience” would be?)
4. Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
5. Sketch out highly successful scenarios
6. Organise views into a site map
7. Sketch the essential features & look
8. Map your visitors’ attention
9. Arrange the visual elements to work together

I suppose we can make the assumption that the author has already figured out the who, why and what.

Right?

Ryan Carter wrapped up his piece on producing a semi-pro video over at the Download Squad. Very Windows heavy and it seemed very Windows-constrained with much talk of his Windows box crashing and needing mucho memory.

Since our point is not to discuss how but who, what and why, I think he did a fair to middlin’ job on a how-to for a quick and dirty video. And he did have nice touch regarding distributing on DVD or CD-ROM.

I realized pretty quickly that quoting Mark Twain would be beyond cliche. But, did anyone hear this story on NPR the other night? There was a quote from political consultant Bill Buck who said YouTube is “a tremendously valuable way, not only now but into the future, for getting out whatever message you want to get out.”

What-ever.

Bill Buck’s company produced attack ads for multiple candidates (with the same talent: cute little girl, soccer mom, young active male) targeting the candidates’ stand on stem cell research. It doesn’t matter here what your political stand is on the subject. What matters is your communications stand. Since when did multiple customers have EXACTLY the same objectives for their communications? Yeah, I get that they are staying “on message” but how unauthentic is that?

Buck says “I think YouTube is revolutionizing political communication.”

Hell-low?? Could we wheel in the perspective here?

Flashback. 1960. Kennedy-Nixon debates. Television changes the face of political communication.

Flashback. 1980. CNN changes the face of television news (and subsequently political communication.)

Flashback. 1996 (Or 2000. Mainstream media took a while to get it.) The Internet revolutionizes political communication.

That’s only one side of this story really. So YouTube is, at its best, what? Another media outlet on the Internet channel? At its worst, (or its best, depending on your perspective) its like a big community bulletin board. That’s Big like international big.

In the U.S. we’ve had that before. Big community bulletin board, WITH regulation and contracts to back it up, where anyone could show video they produced. It was called “public access television”.

Internet video could be the answer (a revival?) to community communication empowerment. GoogTube, AOLVideo, Brightcove are all most excellent. They are a great location for a soapbox, a really tall soapbox, for people to shout their views. Or they could be the next public access television.

As of August 2006 YouTube had over 16 million videos posted. So now we have a kazillion channels to watch. Admittedly with metadata so you can “find” what you want to watch. But what are people watching? And what’s the point?

Maybe I’m being too serious about this. But if I’m going to communicate something shouldn’t I know who, why and what? And if I DO know the three Ws do I really want to be buried in millions and millions of choices? If something is worth saying to someone for some reason don’t you want to be sure the other person gets the message?

And so now we have a new “Broadcast”. Or a new “Narrowcast”. Whatever.

Pamela Slim has a great post on writing over at Escape From Cublicle Nation that reminded me to break out my copy of “Elements of Style” and brush up a bit in the writing department.

I posted a comment on this well intentioned article over at StartUp Nation. The article almost hit the mark so I dropped some info on the “Three Ws of Communications”.

I’ll cover more about the “Three Ws” in a future (soon) post.

Hugh Bennet has been writing about disc-based medium for a long time. I first read his articles in the mid-90s in “CD-ROM Professional” (which became “Emedia Professional” and now “Event DV”.)

Hugh has recently updated this very comprehensive guide to HD DVD (with mentions of the competing standard, he has an FAQ for Blue Ray DVD also). If you want to understand almost any aspect of the new competing standards then this is a one stop shop.

WARNING: This FAQ is NOT a production guide. It is for gearheads or those with a gearhead inclination. If your head has a tendency to explode when fed too much information use extreme caution when reading this resource.

You have to love the electronics industry and their penchant for developing competing standards. High definition DVD brings us two more: HD DVD and BlueRay disc. The last big standard, DVD, was reigned in, actually dictated, by the motion picture studios. Mostly because EVERYONE got burnt by the VHS/Betamax war. And the color TV war a couple of decades before that. And the AM/FM battle before that. So now we have HD DVD (Toshiba’s) and Blue Ray DVD (Sony’s). Does any of this ring a bell? Can’t we all just get along?

Engadget does a great job of describing the divide and difference between HD DVD and Blue Ray DVD. The two are here to stay (for now.) So sharpen your holiday gift list pencil and button up your wallet (either one will cost) — and just deal.

Gotta love the “free” market!

A colleague passed this post from SEOMmoz.org on to me — 11 Best Practices for URLs — and it seemed to tie the whole URL naming issue up with a nice little bow. The author even addresses the sub-optimal URLs (http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1422) they use for the site.

Besides not posting for weeks (yes weeks) I realized that, so far, we’ve definitely had an online tilt to things (such as they are) here at Doing Media. Well, that’s got to change — but not yet.

So… I teach media communications courses, among them “Web Publishing.” Pretty broad topic but essentially it’s web production 101. For my students, naming their pages and their files (URLs) is part of our Information Architecture module.

It takes them awhile to get it because at this point in website consumption They take it for granted. They don’t notice page titles or URLs because I think they figure it’s the luck of the draw — if they bookmark a page they’ll figure it out later if it doesn’t come with a good title or URL. If it does have something understandable in the browser title bar or address box it’s a bonus!

Once I point out why good page naming and file (and folder) naming is good for them and for their visitors there is always an ‘A-ha!” moment. And so it’s interesting that after all these years of web site production professionals still have these conversations and reminders of best practice.

Read on. And I promise we’ll get to less online-ish stuff soon. No, really.