1. summary of second part
In the second part of today's lecture we discussed the first steps in establishing the subject matter and focus of your site. In order to attract an audience and then meet their needs, you should:
- establish why you are writing the site. What gap in the market does it fill? What original slant are you taking with the content or the presentation?
- think about who your target audience is, and if necessary, present the material appropriately
- think about what reasons people would have for visiting your site: if there are different answers to this you will need to ensure that different visitor categories are directed to different places.
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2. what's coming in lecture 3
If we want to present any substantial amount of material online, the single web page will quickly become a constraint. It is also a waste of the real potential of the WWW and HTML. Almost every web page will include a number of hypertext links which embed the page into a web site and, by connecting sites together, the whole WWW.
Links are another form of text formatting tag and are easy to handle. However there are a number of other issues raised by their use which this lecture will cover. These include:
- making your links helpful, and your site easily navigable
- styling your links: this introduces the idea of pseudo-classes
- structuring your site: site structures can differ depending on the topic and general focus of your site.
There is no required reading for lecture 3. However, you should come to the (real or virtual) lecture with a good idea of the subject matter of your course work web site. The last part of the lecture will deal with the week 4 course work in detail: you will find this information a great deal more useful if you have come to a decision on your course work topic (and other issues raised in this lecture such as your target audience and their information needs).
END OF LECTURE TWO. Return to the lecture 2 index.
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