Matt Bush

CS73N

May 18, 2007

For this assignment, I critiqued:

• Rich Cairns
• Erik Goldman

Rich Cairns: HTML Tutorial Site

Have you specified your audience? During your presentation, you mentioned how a good percentage of college students that you surveyed don’t know anything about HTML. Is your site going to focus on college-age students, or people of any age? Although you don’t expect your users to know any HTML, are there any assumptions you make about their background, such as basic computing skills? Also, how much time do you expect the average user to stay on your site? If your site is something users would just drop by for a quick glance, you should design your site around its own content. But if you expect users to spend a lot of time on your site, you should design your site around the user experience. There are different services you can provide users who register for the site: tracking their progress through your tutorials, creating test pages, and storing personal pages on your site, for example.

I am curious about how your fish mascot will evolve as you develop your site. Do you think the fish is an audience-appropriate tool to help them focus on what to learn? Will the fish appear to explain every single step, or will it just make appearances to provide helpful tips? You can go many ways with this fish; it could become a successful kind of brand logo for your site, or it could just turn into an annoying image that takes up space on every page.

You said that you’ll provide an index of tags and other resources for users who have already HTML to use for quick lookup. I like this idea, and I think that in addition to providing these resources, your site should link to other sites that provide further tutorials. After going through your site, many users could potentially be interested in learning more advanced HTML, CSS, PHP, programming, or graphic design. Nobody expects you to have all of this on your site, but being able to point users towards sites that complement your site’s content would be helpful.

How often will you add new content to the site? You may try to put all the content on the page as soon as possible and leave the site alone once it’s complete, but a successful Web 2.0 model site would always be adding new content. There are a lot of things you can do once your tutorials are written out, such as reworking some tutorials based on user feedback, and adding pointers to other sites with good examples of HTML. Having a front page with announcements of new contents assures users that you’re taking good care of the site.

Finally, how is your site better than your competitors’ HTML tutorial sites? You explained that your site will be easy to read and understand, without distracting advertisements, but nevertheless there must be thousands of HTML tutorials out on the web. A more important question to ask yourself, then, is how will you let your users know why your site is better? Some marketing on your front page could make the key different in which site your users choose. Consider using terms like “easy to use”, “in no time”, “step-by-step”, “no background necessary” or including user testimonies.

Erik Goldman: Bottled Water Analysis

Your site looks like it is developing effectively. You have a good layout, and you have a lot of important content up so far that successfully argues your site’s key ideas. While your key ideas are all present, I think it would be effective for you draw more attention to them. On a website, simply writing ideas in prose sometimes isn’t enough to get people’s attention. I would suggest putting key phrases like “significant environmental impact” in boldface, or putting it higher up on the page. The environmental impact is one of your most important arguments, yet you don’t necessarily notice it the first time you look at the page.

I notice your site uses casual language: “That’s a lot of money.” “Absolutely not”. I think this use of language is acceptable for your site, but be careful where you take it. Casual language is good for speaking directly to your audience, gaining their trust by speaking to them the way a friend would. But professional language could also be useful if you want to strengthen your content’s credibility and urgency. You really could go one way or the other with this, so think about what kind of image you want to present and reflect that image in your registers.

A suggestion on content: During your presentation, we discussed some key situations that keep bottled water in business, such as having access to water when you travel around. I think this is an important enough consideration to your argument for a page or a section on your site. You should suggest alternatives to commercial bottled water, such as Nalgene bottles. You should also talk about using tap water filters, for those consumers who buy bottled water because their drinking water is safe but unpleasantly hard. Consider linking to sites that further explain or sell these items.

Because your site could be considered an environmental and ethical cause, you could definitely intersect with existing environmental efforts at Stanford and in the world. If you state clearly and explain how your issue is an environmental issue as well as a consumer issue, you could get more people passionate about your cause. You could also get more links from nonprofit sites and sustainability-related Stanford groups by drawing attention to certain issues.

I’m curious as to how your site will develop from the four pages that you have up so far. Your site layout is neat and to-the-point. It’s a bit confusing to have the bottom of your main page say “take a look at the site” without linking to anything or telling us where to look for a menu, but I’m sure that will change when you have more content up. To help users navigate, you could always link to a site map, and as always, you should have an About This Site page to briefly explain who you are and why you’re telling them this.