Preface

This whole sight started out as a research paper. There were many changes that had to be made in order to make it into a site that was enjoyable and user friendly. The first thing that I changed was the text.

Text Changes

I took out a lot of the content of the original paper that I had written. I lost content but it was worth it. If I had left most of the content there would be too much information for the particular pages and it would be very cumbersome to read. Having less text makes it easier to find out what you want to know about the photographer that the site is about.

Also I broke up the paper into small sections. The paragraphs in the original were very long and not fit for a web site. To make the navigation easy and clear I added relevant headings to each small section of text. This also makes the site scannable.

The original paper was written in a formal manner where as the web site isn't. I had to change much of the text that I did keep. I used smaller words and tried to make it more conversational while still keeping it informational. I also had to take out all the references that were in the original.

The works page was a specific problem of its own when it came to text. I had originally critiqued four of Stieglitz's works but I only have two of them on the site. The reason for this is because I wanted to have the photo on the web next to the paragraph where I talked about the photo, but I could only find two of the four photos that I mentioned. I ended up just getting rid of the two critiques that I didn't have pictures to go along with.

Photos

There are three photos on my site that I got from the internet. This was okay because its only for academic purposes but I still needed to make a reference to where I got the photo from. I kind of took the easy way out and just made a link to where I got the photo from. I had the photos as pop-ups first but changed them after the critique in class because people thought that they would like to see the photo while reading the description of it.

Related Links

I needed information to fill up the side bar that I have on the right of every page. I wanted to use the side bar as the main navigation which worked well except I didn't know what to do on how to get back to my intro page. I ended up using a suggestion made in class and having my heading be the link back to the first page. This is a new convention of the web and since my main heading is graphic it seemed to make sense. On the pages below my links there was a lot of bare space. I thought related links were important due to the subject of my site. Because he is a photographer I wanted links that people could go to to get more information and to look at more of his work. On the other pages I took out bits of information that wasn't absolutely needed in the text but that I still wanted to have on the site. The interesting stuff, you could say.

Pages

I chose to break up the information into three pages. The first one was history which I thought made sense because that is what one would expect when they get to a biographical site. The thoughts page was important because of Stieglitz's role in society. His main accomplishment in life was that he changed the stereotypes of photography as an art. The last category is his works. Because he is a photographer is also made sense to have some of what he has done on the site.

Because I have a few pages to the site I put an small intro paragraph on each page. I did this for consistency and for easy navigation. Right away when a user gets to a page they know what the page is about and if that is what they were looking for or not.

Give and Take

My content of the original piece to this web site changed a lot. I gave up a lot of information and content. There was also a lot of fluff that was taken out. The site is very easy to navigate through, everything is only one click away. The changing of the text is what made the site work as compared to the original. Some content is gone but the site still has all the important information and places where you can find more information if you need to do so. The site gained a lot more enjoyability, I think anyone would rather look through the site than read the long, boring research paper that it started out to be. So, in the end I would say that it makes for a very good web site.

History

Thoughts on Photography

Works

More Sites on Alfred Stieglitz

Master's of Photography

Get the Picture

American Master's

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