Online Journalism 2: Features and Personal Web Sites

Colour Lovers and Modern Life

As you start developing your ideas for your web sites, you'll need to think a little bit about colour. One good source of advice is Colour Lovers - which looks at the different palettes of colours used by different web sites and magazines. It's good for identifying different colours that work together and combinations that are currently 'trendy'.

I found Colour Lovers via the excellent Modern Life, which is also a great source of design advice. Stuart Brown, the guy behind the site, is very clued up but also amusingly sarcastic about current web design trends. He has a great guide to currently popular Web 2.0 typefaces and a useful 'web typography cheat sheet'. He also written some good basic advice on developing effective web designs and some excellent posts about popular Web 2.0 colours and the way he uses colour on his site. His guide to writing good headlines online is very witty but also very useful. Have a look round the site and see what else you can find.

Today's session

Today we're going to be doing a variety of things. I've got some more Fireworks tutorials for you to try - covering working with layers, text and creating buttons. We've done the latter before but there is an easier and quicker way to create buttons and navigation elements than the first way I showed you.

I've put the files you need to do the tutorials in an Online Journalism 2 sub-folder, in the Online folder on the Journalism shared area. If you get all of the tutorials done, you should have an example home page completed by the end of today. Save that somewhere and we can use in next week, when we'll be looking in more detail at web layout - specifically tables vs layers.

Aside from Fireworks, we're going to review where we're at with the email interviews. If you have received a reply you need to start working with your material. Think about the writing guidelines and advice we looked at last week and start laying out your text in something like Word. Start gathering and creating the assets and copy you'll need for your layouts. Research useful or relevant links, gather visuals, write a blurb/intro, think about whether you need to cut the material.

I'm also going to try to find time to talk to each of you invidually about your site plans - the idea is to make sure you've done the necessary development work so you can start creating in the next week or two.

Writing for the web

Today I'm planning to talk about some of Jakob Nielsen's ideas about how users read web pages. He argues that, because web readers don't read screen text in the same way they do printed matter, when you work online you  need to change the way you write and the way you format the resulting prose.

Nielsen developed his ideas in the early days of the web - you can still read some of his original essays about web writing - e.g. How Users Read on the Web (there's a longer version of this online, if you want more detail), Microcontent - How to write Headlines, Page Titles and Subject Lines and Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace.

Nielsen's guidelines are very much a product of the time (the mid-nineties) when they were written. They also reflect the fact that he's more of a usability expert/designer than a writer. He's adapted them slightly since the late 90s, but not that much. I'll try to hand out a photocopy of a section from his latest book, Prioritizing Web Usability, which came out last year.

Nielsen's ideas have been very influential. Many big online sites follow his advice on producing brief, 'scannable' text. You will need to know about this if you end up working for one of the big online news/media organisations.

Other people have approached writing online more from a writer's perspective. For a slightly alternative take, try Crawford Kilian's Effective Web Writing. Kilian's piece is much more discursive - more like a standard piece of print prose. Nielsen might argue that Kilian should have broken it down, edited it, chunked it, added headings and bullet points to make it more scannable and web-friendly. What do you think?

Today's session

Today we're going to be doing a mix of things. We'll look at how your email interviews are going - whether you need to send follow-ups, what kind of material you've got etc. Those of you who weren't here last week - I'll go over what we talked about last week and help you sort out someone to interview and a list of questions.

Next we'll look at some ideas about how to write effectively online - in particular the views of usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Next, we'll work some more on building your knowledge of Fireworks. We're going to do a tutorial from a manual that will help you learn how to draw shapes and add colours and effects. The aim is to give you some skills you can then use to start creating some of the graphics for your web sites - from buttons to banners.

Online interviews

How do people write and present interviews in online publications. Here are some links to different sorts of online interviews/profiles. Have a look at them and think about the general approach.

• Two interviews - one with the American author Bret Easton Ellis and one with the web designer Daniel Brown - both ran in the online magazine KultureFlash.
• An interview with with Baltimore band Animal Collective that ran in the online zine God is in the TV.
• Kruger Magazine's interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem.
• An interview with the well known blogger Tiffany Brown, done by another well known blogger - Rebecca Blood.
• A fairly out there interview with the well known physicist Freeman Dyson.

Online reporting

The Online Journalism Review has a good introduction to online reporting on a wiki that it runs. As they point out, a lot of the time, when you're reporting a story online, you're going to use traditional methods - interviews, observation, document searches. You'll just do these in a slightly different way.

As the OJR point out, there are more radical approaches to reporting online that aim to take advantage of the collaborative aspect of the net - things like Open Source Reporting or Distributed reporting. We'll talk about this in class.

But if you want an example of a journalist writing about this kind of thing and attempting to put it into practice, try The See Through CEO, a story written by American tech journalist Clive Thompson for Wired Magazine. Before the story, he used his blog to talk about the story he was doing and ask for tips and afterwards he talked about how the experiment had gone.

Today's session

Today we're going to be looking at online research and reporting. More particularly, we're going to focus on email interviews. I've tapped some old contacts who've kindly agreed to do email interviews. I assign one subject to each one of you. Then you'll need to research them and develop an angle and an approach for the piece. Then we'll need to develop a list of possible questions.

The aim is get enough material from your interviews to write a short 600 word profile/interview. We'll then use that for layout practice and, if we can develop a theme, we could then use the interviews to build up a larger site.