Site Report

Purpose

When we started creating this website, it was strictly for the entertainment of our users, but ended up being overly entertaining for us as we made it.  Our thought was, who doesn’t have fun entertaining themselves with random things from around the house from time to time, so why don’t we create a fun site about entertaining yourself?  Our goal was to make people laugh by coming up with the most off-the-cuff activities that most people normally wouldn’t do.     

Design

As our users click their way through our site, they will find pages littered with overly sarcastic instructions on how to create inexpensive fun at the expense of their friends’ and roommates’ sanity.  They will see pictures of us demonstrating extremely absurd stunts that we hope will make them laugh because they are so preposterous.  We also hope that our users will appreciate the humor in the situations we get ourselves into and maybe consider recreating the fun we’ve had.  We’ve also included some really bad original poetry composed as a group on each page; we know we probably won’t get published anytime soon, but we hope to get at least a chuckle out of our users because it is so ridiculous. 

Design and Text Composition Decisions

On each individual page, we kept the subheadings smaller so they didn’t take attention from the pictures of the objects, themselves, but we wanted the headings to set apart the text into logical and noticeable divisions.  We kept the design the same on each page, such as banners underlining headings, to keep consistency and to set apart different sections on the pages when we had more than one activity listed for the objects listed on that page, so as not to confuse the reader. 

We wanted to give our users vivid pictures demonstrating the activities, but we had to decide when to stop adding pictures to each page of the site so they weren’t too cluttered and overrun with images.  We also wanted a fair amount of white space throughout our page so our readers didn’t feel like they were bombarded with massive amounts of text.  We broke things down and put in our images to give the user’s eyes the occasional break from text that they needed. 

We realized that we wanted breadcrumbs on each page that would link back to the homepage if our users wanted to get back there to look at our faces if they wanted to, or maybe just check out what our intentions were or what they were getting themselves into.   We linked the BSU website as well as the site projects index in the breadcrumbs so our users could see where we were from and the other projects we’ve created.   

Problems

One of the problems we encountered was trying to push a cookie cutter into the ground on December 14: who would’ve known how hard it would be to shove a metal cookie cutter in the ground when it was five degrees?  Also, white kitchen garbage bags are not sufficient when getting egged. 

We had trouble in the beginning deciding how to group objects together to create activities because we wanted to do many different things with our seventeen objects.  We originally thought about making a page for each item and then detailing several different activities on each page, but we soon realized that we would be repeating ourselves from page to page without enough content to justify the repetition. 

When we were drawing up our site in the beginning, we weren’t sure how to set up the homepage.  We originally had wanted to include an index page so that would include our ridiculous poetry just to get the laughs started, but then we realized that it wouldn’t be useful because our user would’ve had to know to go to the index to view the pages; it would just be a wasted step.   

We struggled with choosing the colors we wanted our site to be decked out in.  We couldn’t agree as a group, for one thing, and we’re girls and picky with colors to begin with.  We had trouble finding colors appealing to the eye that would suit the upbeat feeling of our site.  When we did choose colors, we had to change the colors of our links because we had chosen a dark background.  We also noticed that the visited links were either very hard to see or impossible to see on Windows machines because of the dark color we chose.  We finally were able to change the color the visited link turned so that it is now a light yellow and much easier to read. 

Another final problem that we had was on our site report. We tried to make links to our related sites, but our page properties links are white, so they didn't show up on the background of our site. And now you'll have to paste it into a browser to find it.

We had lots of petty and aggravating problems pop up in Dreamweaver.  One of the most persistent was that we had trouble with our images and text running together on some pages.  We thought that we had inserted cell padding, but figure it may have been changed or taken out.  In the end, we put the padding back in and the appearance was much easier on the eye. 

We also faced other little problems.  One was that we couldn’t find any sites that were as random or absurd as ours.  We found some sites with matching tone or some similar ideas, but nothing that we could really compare ours to, in-depth.  We struggled to find the time to get everything done and we quickly realized that creating the site was a much bigger undertaking than we had anticipated.  Daphne said she almost started to feel like it was a job and will be expecting her paycheck in the mail next week.  

One of the biggest, most tedious problems we faced was very early on when we created our index page. At first we didn’t know what we were doing, so we created columns and rows that we later found out we didn’t need for other pages. When we went to work on our content pages, it was hard to use our template page because it wasn’t set up the way we wanted/needed it to be. Therefore, we went basically redesigned every content page for each item. Also, we created a new template because the first one didn’t do the things we wanted it to. There were many problems dealing with how we were sizing the cells. Many of them wouldn’t resize, ( we got an error popup that said the cell was at its minimum size already and couldn’t go any smaller) and since we had no clue how to outsmart Dreamweaver, we ended up creating entirely new pages. It was very tedious and in the end we wished that we would have had more experience with Dreamweaver before we actually started working with it for our project. Also, it would have been nice to have some type of guide for working with Dreamweaver.

The Original Report

Our original report was too vague. We really didn’t know what was in store for us. We said we wanted to entertain, which we did, but beyond that, we honestly didn’t know what kinds of problems that we would run into.

As for the physical layout, we also had very broad ideas: “On its most physical level we'll have our navigation off to one side (right or left, obviously); the navigation will include objects as links to the pages about the objects. We thought we could organize our items also within the navigation bar into common or not-so-common items. Our homepage will most likely include a picture of us so people know who's actually putting this together, as well as a description of what our site is about. We would like to include the poems, etc., about the objects with an image as some sort of index, but don't know how that will effect our homepage navigation bar.”

More problems

It seemed that no matter how many good ideas we had, nothing worked out in Dreamweaver. We had to piddle with every little thing on that program and it drove us nuts. Nothing seemed to work the same on every page. No matter how much of a strong physical layout proposal we had, nothing worked equivalently on each page- we had a banner at the bottom and on some pages it would be the size we wanted it to be: set at 52 for height. Then on other pages, it would say that it was set at 52, but it was twice as big as it was on other pages.

Also, we wanted our side bar to stretch all the way down to the bottom banner, but every time that it would look like it was aligned properly in Dreamweaver, we would check it out in Netscape or Internet Explorer and nothing was aligned- either the side bar wasn’t down far enough or it was down too far. We went back into Dreamweaver and no matter how much piddling we did with either, nothing would make that stay the way we wanted them to be. All of the content pages and the homepage side bars and bottom banners are aligned properly in Dreamweaver, but nothing looks right in a browser. Finally we did the professional thing and said screw it.

Related Sites

http://www.dadadisco.com

Title: Dadadisco. This site is basically someone's spot to store things they've written. It's not really like our site on the homepage, but a few pages linked off it are a lot like what we wanted to do.  We was impressed with her voice because it was really strong and sarcastic; We also liked her ideas, as she came up with a lot of different activities to do with three simple objects.  We'd like to keep our site fun and upbeat as Dadadisco; however, we’d like ours to be easier to navigate. On Dadadisco, it took us a while to find out where she talked about entertaining oneself with simple objects. We also want to include images of the objects, use a greater variety of them, and we also thought that her choice of a color theme was really distracting and mostly hard to read (hot pink text on lime green background).

http://www.bored.com

Title: Bored.com. This site was basically hitting on the purpose of our site: to entertain. It was split up into categories, (humor, trivia, for kids, etc.), which I thought worked well. We'd like to include some sections or an index like this site did, but instead of listing categories, list the seventeen items we chose. Overall, we thought it was well organized, but it suggested other events/activities on the Internet for its readers to do instead of keeping them at Bored.com. We think we should try to keep our readers at our site for a while--make it worth our time to make. We liked that the homepage seemed like a database or index, however, ours would link to things we've created to keep readers entertained.

http://www.boredomsucks.net

Title: Boredom Sucks.  This site was also used as a database or index of different sites on the Internet that had activities for users to go to. This was unlike what we wanted to do because, like Bored.com, it sent the user away from their site to other people's blogs and related sites. We liked that it included some images, as our site will be centered a lot around images. This site included little original content, or really any amount of reading at all, which will be the complete opposite as our site. We didn't like that there was no actual voice included on it, because we want our site to have a lot of voice and personality. The site was well organized, as it had a sidebar with categories to search, but all of the activities were dependent on technology, something we're trying to get away from with our site--users will have to use technology to read our activities and learn how to do them, but after that our ideas are basically technology-free.

An ideal site would be using the organization and overall site theme of Bored.com, while using original content and sarcastic tone of voice as in Dadadisco.com--but the ideas of images that boredomsucks.net used were something we wanted to include as well.

Group Work

When creating our site, it was a constant group effort.  We chose our site’s colors together, as well as the layout, with little disagreement and we each learned something new in Dreamweaver everyday.  We all did our share of formatting pages and cropping and saving images as whoever had their hand on the mouse did the job.  We divided up the content pages amongst ourselves and each wrote three to four of them.  LeAnn did a lot of the picture taking because she was the one that had the camera.  Otherwise, we basically all performed the same tasks.   LeAnn also should get extra points because she got pelted with eggs by Daphne and Daphne doesn’t have the good of aim, as some egg yolk froze to her arm. 

Testing Usability

The purpose of our site was to entertain, so we tested our user to see if they were entertain, and also how easy it was for them to navigate each page.  The age range we were aiming at was 19 to 22 years, so both of our users were within that age bracket. 

The first user we tested was early on in the process.  She was on a Windows machine, and pointed out that our visited links within the sidebar disappeared.  She commented that it made it hard for her to work quickly from page to page because she couldn’t really read the titles of the pages she’d all ready been to.  We didn’t give her specific tasks of things to do on our site because we didn’t have all of the pages done yet; she just looked to find early navigation problems, and mostly things about our site design. 

We fixed the visited links’ colors to a yellow, and filled in our content before we tested the second user. 

The second user was tested more on our design and content.  She said the homepage worked well because it automatically set the tone of our site.  She knew from our introductions that our site wouldn’t be entirely serious, which we think helps our readers get into a mindset to allow for our weird activities and sarcastic comments. 

Another aspect we were aiming for with our site was to keep the readers there for a while.  I asked the user if she would stay (if I wasn’t making her) and she said yes because she was intrigued with the items and combinations of items on our sidebar.  I asked if it was mislead by any of the page titles, and she said she didn’t know what to expect when she clicked on Eggs and Garbage bag, for example, so it was more intrigue that kept her there than anything. 

We sat and watched her use the site for a little while, and she tested all of our links, and they all worked.  She did point out that the Hanger page’s content was pushed too far to the right so that the words were being cut off.  She thought it was easy to find the items and activities I asked her to because everything she needed was in the sidebar and didn’t move. 

One complaint she had with the usability of the site (if she were actually going to perform the activities) was that sometimes the content got a bit too “wordy” for her to quickly get at the point of all of the activities.  She said some of the appeal was to read all of it because it was humorous, but she didn’t think she would stay long enough if she was trying to get at the activities fast.