http://www.bestfriends.org/

This site is for Best Friends Animal Society which works with other humane groups. The mission of Best Friends is driven by the simple philosophy that kindness to animals helps build a better world for all of us. This site appealed to me because of the bright colors. The website I am creating is going to be for a friend who is starting an animal care business. This site reflects the bright colors and the amount of pictures that I want to use. The layout is also nice. It is easy to navigate through and and user friendly. This website creates a positive feeling and welcoming feeling of being at the site that I wnat to create as well.

My proposed project is a website for the Karate club. This is my source/model text: http://www.csun.edu/karate/

The purpose of this website is to both provide information (ex: practice schedule) to current members and to advertise the club to potential members. The audience consists mostly of college students from CSUN (California State University, Northridge). The website has a modern design and many pictures of members, thus indicating that the club is alive and thriving. The site is easy to navigate (with only 7 links at the top of the page). Finally, it sets a welcoming, yet serious tone – one that is meant to be attractive to future potential club members by indicating that only those who are serious about martial arts should apply.

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/

Flow is a flash game, and as a flash game the main goal is to challenge the player in some way, allowing a sense of accomplishment upon completion. As the game cannot be saved and can be completed very quickly, it is targeted towards casual gamers and web browsers, probably browsing the web on break or for leisure at home.

Flow's gameplay comes in levels, where you control a creature by moving your mouse. The creature can then evolve as it eats other creatures, and eventually it changes to a whole new creature, allowing the users to play through the same levels but with a differnt twist. This gameplay makes accomplishment very easy, since every level does not take more than 5 or 10 minutes and the levels are very structured (as opposed to continuous, never ending)

Flow also has a good difficulty variance, as eating ALL the creatures is not required but certainly a goal one could set. The difficulty starts off from extremely easy to more complex as new creatures are introduced, including ones that can eat parts of you.

Lastly something interesting that flow has is that you cannot lose the game. Other creatures can eat your body pieces (And thus the final creature you have will be less complete), but there is no game over screen and you can still complete the game. This definitely helps in creating a fun experience, as losing and having to start over (for games longer than 5 minutes) would surely be annoying.

http://www.pauliebonline.com/v4/index.php

This website is Paul Berry's professional portfolio. This website presents the information in a professional and organized manner. The text is ogranized in a manner that is easy to use and to find. There is one main color scheme; which helps to make the website look professional. This website's main audience seems to be current or possible clients for the designer.

I would like to create my own professional portfolio and I think this is website is a good example of what I'm thinking for my own project.

http://www.http://www.csszengarden.com/

For my project I am creating a portfolio site of the projects I have created since college. Due to the fact that the site should be fast and easily updated I have chosen to build it using HTML and CSS. The best refrence I have foud for a project like this is a site called CSS Zen Garden.
CSS Zen Garden is a web-site that shows a simple web-site describing the power of CSS in design. It then has a link to the code used to make the site. Zen Garden challenges users to design their own version of this exact same web site using CSS. While the site does not show exaclty what I want it is effectively a large source of how people chose to create certain affects and how you can adapt them to fit your needs.

http://www.lakecentral.k12.in.us/teachers/aitczak/
This is a teacher’s website that is aimed towards fifth grade students. Its purpose is to provide an online list of items that the student can use throughout the year. It also provides information for the parents. It is set up on the web for anyone to access (including the general public). This website shows a definite professional attitude but also makes everything easy to navigate for children and adults. The maker uses pictures and graphics that the students identify with throughout the website.

http://www.lakecentral.k12.in.us/teachers/skuchars/
This website was created by a teacher and is aimed towards fourth grade students and parents. Its purpose is to provide extra resources for students and parents about the fourth grade classroom and curriculum. Although less professional looking than the first website, this site looks to identify more with the student with fun graphics and a busy background. It is easy to navigate and has pertinent information for students and parents alike. This is also a webpage that is available to anyone on the web.

I would like to create a website for my class that I will be teaching this summer. I would like to include many of the elements found in these two sites as well as my own personal touches.

I found this demo reel for someone looking to be a character TD on YouTube. A character TD, for clarification, is someone in a production studio who creates visual controls that animators can use to move characters, such as they were puppets.

This particular demo reel is meant to show employers the capabilities of its creator. The reel is short and begins, not by showing the actual controls, but the results of using those controls. I think this is best because it captures the audience (the potential employer) before boring him/her with technical controls and jargon. A potential employer will have made their decision within the first 10 seconds of viewing a reel so it is important to begin with something as impressive as possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtlyLu80_CQ

"Love, then whatever." -St. Augustine

http://www.emerymusic.com/palebird/index.html
http://www.anberlin.com/index.php
http://www.theclassiccrime.com/
http://www.underoath777.com/main.php

I believe the sense of purpose of these websites is to inform and stimulate interest in these bands. These websites are packed with information such as, who the band members are, where they are from, the history of the band, where they have played, where are they playing next, multimedia, and merchandise.

The Audience is most likely the concert going youth who enjoy alternative rock. This category includes mostly teenagers and a large amount of people in thier twenties and possibly thirties.

All of these websites have high contrast and bold colors. The important inforation is also bolded or in a larger text in order to stand out.

My source/model website is: http://www.opencongress.org/

My theme: Make a website which helps voters for local elections know the candidates, what their job means, and the issues.

Analysis of Model

Purpose:
The model website opencongress is a great example of the type of information that I want to give to my visitors. Their sense of purpose is shown and is clearly visible: "OpenCongress brings together official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill.". OpenCongress achieves its goals by showing visitors all of the different bills that are going on in congress (up to date information), as well as information about senators and representatives. It also has content related to the most relevant issues being discussed.

Audience:
While the site is supposed to be for everyone, I am quite overwhelmed with the amount of information that is available on the site. It seems pretty intimidating at first. On their about us page, they state "OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement." Their goal is to reach everyone, so that everyone can make a decision.

Context:
Users will of course be unsure or confused about some topic or information. They are coming to this site to find something about that is important to their voting decisions. The site's purpose perfectly fits this context.

Strategies:
The designers use a very simple and modern design. There are a few links on the menu to the left, and the content is displayed on the right. They have a search box as well. One of the most important strategies that they seem to use is the "House in Session", "Senate in Session" links in the upper right. It makes people think that this site is really up to date. Another strategy is that they do not use advertisements anywhere. This leads to credibility and legitimacy.

Arrangement:
They use a very simple arrangement, a header, followed by a menu on the left, a content area on the right, and a footer at the bottom. All of the information is on demand, and any of the relevant topics a user might be looking for are easily within grasp. (Especially nice is the navigation bar, easily visible below the header).

Medium:
The internet is obviously the best place to have readily updated and available information. Not only is the medium really cheap, it is also less biased since users need not pay advertisement fee in magazines or newspapers. They can reach a wide audience. It is most likely as well that people who are interested in more information would be using the Internet already, since that is one of its major puposes.

As a math education major, I am planning on designing a lesson plan on PowerPoint that I can potentially use in the future. Here is a link to an example - the third one is the presentation that I looked at.

http://www.tburg.k12.ny.us/anderson/ppt.htm

The purpose of this teacher's PowerPoint presentation is very specific - to teach his students how to calculate the area of a circle and also to explain how it was calculated in ancient times. Based on the subject matter, I would guess that his audience is a class of middle school students. He communicates all of the information in a step by step manner that is easy to follow. The diagrams and explanations he gives are very clear. It appears, based on the instructions on each slide to "Click your mouse for the next idea", that the context of this presentation is for students to be directly involved. (as opposed to the teacher simply presenting at the front of the classroom)

I believe this example is very effective. My PowerPoint presentation will be different in some ways, of course. I plan on covering a much broader subject area, although I'm not sure specifically what that is yet. I also haven't decided if my audience will be middle school or high school students. One thing to consider is if this medium would be better suited for one of those age groups. Also, would it be better to have the students interact and go through the presentation themselves, or would simply going through the material at the front of the classroom be a better idea? These are all things to consider in regards to the rhetorical elements.

My project is a Bio-ethics like introductory peace for people unfamiliar with research. The goal is to show people that the media blow things out of proportion when they talk about some research.

I recently decided that the medium I was using was not going to be very available to my target audience. I have now changed my project's direction to desinging an online quiz.

My example is: http://www.fda.gov/oc/opacom/kids/html/wash__hands.htm

Although this is not a visually pleasing quiz and looks quite unprofessional, it has the flow I want the quiz to have. I believe that showing people how wrong thier misconceptions are will shock them into looking at science a little closer. I needed a quiz that shows one question at a time and then gives the right answer, as opposed to a survey type of quiz. I am unsure what I should use to make the quiz, or how I should get started, so if anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it.

For this project I am going to revamp my portfolio website, im not pleased with my current one:
web.ics.purdue.edu/~ageorges

For my new portfolio website, i want it to be simple, and straight forward. I want the user to be able to select the category, scroll through the images, and view the image in a larger view. I also want to be able to use flash to add more of an interactive feel.

Here is an example of a sight i like.
http://www.braingiants.com/photo/photography.html
Its a little complicated, so i want to simplify mine quite a bit from this example, but its a good reference.

Aaron Georges
ageorges@purdue.edu

http://www.thehaskellco.com/

This is a website for a large construction company located in Atlanta. The site's main function is to provide information for their potential employers who would want to contract them to construct a project and to serve as a way for potential employees to submit resumes and learn more about the company. Their design is simple and doesn't use too many links or overload you with information. It looks clean and sharp and leads you to think their design/build process uses the same type of professionalism. I'm doing a website for a construction company and plan to keep it simple and clean while being informative at the same time.

http://www.solarsystem.org.uk/planet10/ - Click on launch planet 10 and the part that applies to my project is the solar system part. The part that is similar to what I am doing is the 3D solar system and the information about each planet like diameter and mass. What the text does is gives a 3D image portryal of the solar system along with educates the user with information about the planets and a couple other space objects. It does this by having a simple navigation window that allows the user to choose what they want to know more about. The audience is anyone who wants to learn about the solar system so the information there is not too complex so that most people can understand it.

http://deepimpact.umd.edu/flash/di_science.htm - This text is in the same format that I want which is flash animation text. It also has the simple and professional layout I plan on going with for my project. The text is research animation that shows what different people have done. It does this by showing an image along with a little information about the researcher.

I really like what the guys at rooster teeth do, the website is www.roosterteeth.com they have 3 different machinimas and a comic that they run. What i want to do is more of a flash video comic series, but aimed at the same general audience that these guys focus on, the late teens-early 20's age range. My idea is a short sketch that only takes maybe a couple minutes to watch, but is funny enough that it keeps drawing viewers back for more.

http://storeforknowledge.com/Solar-Flare-Earths-Magnetosphere-Laminated-...

http://safariltd.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=F0...

This educational poster’s target is towards elementary school students. The Earth's Magnetic Field protects the Earth from the solar flares of the Sun. The layout of the Magnetic Field is in different colors to differentiate between the layers of protection. A legend provides association of the colors of the layers to the name of the layers without cluttering the image.

The source/model text I chose is the website http://mathworld.wolfram.com/. Similar to the project I would like to work on, this website is targeted towards people generally interested in math and those who would like to learn more about specific topics in math. The purpose of the database is to be a resource that provides an accurate and extensive collection of mathematics information accessible by anybody. It does this by having 12,647 entries grouped together by topic, such as geometry and number theory, and by being searchable through search engines, by alphabetical index, interactive entries, random entries, and new entries on MathWorld. I was drawn to this site because of its attractive appearance, organization, and ease of use. The color scheme is currently white, blues, greens, and grays, and it remains consistent throughout all pages. A navigation bar on the left hand site of all pages gives quick links to topics and search methods. On the home page, current events in math are listed along with links to more information and references. In the center of the background is an image of a quartic surface named Nordstrand’s Weird Surface. When clicking on the image, the user is directed to a page that gives the implicit equation that defines the shape, links to more information about the surface in the MathWorld database, and references to the information provided on the page.

My source/model text is the instruction booklet for Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones for the Game Boy Advance.

I couldn't find an image of the actual booklet, so instead here is a link to the wikipedia page for Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Emblem:_The_Sacred_Stones

This text has a very clear purpose: to explain the basic controls of the game, the characters, the driving force behind the game (storyline), and to provide a few tips and strategies to keep in mind when playing. The audience is anyone who has purchased the game already. The context for this piece of text would be in the owner’s home, where they have settled back to read about how to play their latest gaming acquisition. The instruction booklet uses several strategies to make it easier for the player to find the help or information for which they are looking. The booklet organizes all the information it contains into different sections, and has a table of contents at the beginning to make it easier for the player to skip ahead to the information they want. Each section is further divided into sub-sections and uses headers to denote each topic. The text is large enough to be read easily by most people, and its sharp contrast to the background on each page helps to make the text stand out even further for easy reading. The booklet also contains screenshots from the game that the player can look at while reading the instructions to help various game mechanics and concepts. In these cases the text and screenshots are placed side-by-side. The bright colors of the booklet, as well as the various in-game images make the booklet interesting to look at, even if you do not take the time to read the instructions.

The purpose of the media was to introduce the audience to the Stevenson High School website. The main audience in this case are the actual students who are currently enrolled in the school system. The generic pictures that the author has used show that the school is fun and always a pleasant experience. The first graphic that pops up during the introduction catches the eye but later on the different pictures are very boring. There are also no words involved with the introduction besides that of the school's name. The strategy is in question with this intro, you start to question, do they have sports, activities, what does the school look like? Here they just show classrooms or people walking in the halls.

My opinion, this media could have been made much better with a quote or a reason why I should be interested in this website or school system. In my media there will be a combination of methods used including graphics and text. But the overall model is bland and boring to the audience.

The second link is a quick animation of something that can be incorporated into a flash intro that would apply some appeal to the website and would be interesting. This link is for a company but the concept that it uses would work for my project with is a flash intro for an elementary school.

http://www.macomb.k12.mi.us/utica/stevenson/
http://www.blc1.com/