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.Because hypertext is the same whetherit jumps to a page on or off the site, users do not necessarily know where they are.There need to besignposts.You can t look down every rabbit hole.It must make sense to think about how you want to define the cyber-boundaries and how you allowor direct your user to leave the site.Some websites are fairly self-contained and present opportunitiesfor navigation around the site.Other websites fan out with ever denser links.Most e-commerce siteswill want to be self-contained.However, with Amazon.com, the links across the web through a title ora product become so heavily layered that it is easy to lose your way because of links.But think aboutthe concept.Amazon is not organized to be self-contained because its original main products booksand videos by their nature take you down a road of exploration.Now Amazon is a virtual depart-ment store.Many sites compete within themselves for your attention.This is true of web portals.Youare called to follow so many different directions and links, which are not necessarily related, thatyou become pole axed with indecision.This arrangement would not be good for a corporate website.Clear navigation and accessibility govern successful interactivity inside websites.Consider Yahoo.com, which is a relatively clean web portal.Nevertheless, there is a bewildering rangeof directions to take from obvious news headlines to  9 Simple Things Women Want. These canbe a distraction.It works for entertainment but not for business or corporate sites.Linking withina site helps organization.Linking to the web, or diverse sites, can fragment the user experience.Youforget what you were looking for in the first place because you followed incidental links and ended upwandering in a maze of links. 276 CHAPTER 12: Writing for Interactive CommunicationsWRITING ISSUESOnce again, we have to contemplate that fascinating transition from something conceptual writtenon paper to something visual and fully produced in the medium itself.We know that in the profes-sional world, you cannot just keep this in one individual s head.Ideas have to be pitched to a cli-ent, costed out in a budget, and communicated to a team of specialists who will translate them intoconcrete visuals.Translating from the page to the screen the computer screen, in this case is theessence of the media business.ConceptProduction methods and the role of scripting are not standardized and predictable in the way thatthey are in the world of linear media.Nevertheless, we can outline a best practice that will ensure asatisfactory result.If more than one person is working on a project, a written concept and more isessential.It is probably indispensable even for a single creator to define a concept before committingresources.Design DocumentA design document is unique to interactive media.It addresses the need to know two important char-acteristics of a website: what it will look like and how it will be organized.Navigational design setsapart the pros from the amateurs.All interactivity is based on links.Anybody can create links.The ques-tion is whether the links serve a coherent purpose and whether the navigational idea is well communi-cated to the user.If this stage has any equivalence to the linear world, it would be to the treatment.FlowchartNo question about it! A flowchart is a diagram.The thinking behind a flowchart could be theresponsibility of a writer or a designer.It does not require writing skills per se.It requires skills toorder spatially and sequentially.Making this diagram is enabled by software such as Inspiration,Smartdraw, and Storyvision.Whether a writer, developer, designer, or programmer does it, it has tobe done so that the production team knows what it is trying to create.For each click and link, thereis another page on screen.So it has to be designed and laid out and the assets necessary to that pageassembled.The purpose of the flowchart is to chart the intended navigation to be presented to theuser.It becomes a way of verifying functionality and a basis for a programmer to write the code thatwill make the links work.Breakdown for ProductionAny given web page is comprised of multiple media.Each of these media elements is an asset.If youridea calls for a still picture, you have to create that picture or buy it from some copyright owner.Ifyou need a video clip, once again you have to shoot it or buy it ready made from some source.A listof assets for each page of the website must be compiled and broken down into production-specificcategories: video, audio, graphics, still photography, and text.A production manager or project man-ager can assign to graphic designers, video producers, or animators the list of needed assets in each Writing Issues 277category that have to be assembled for construction of the site.We could probably find that in prac-tice, the writer hands over to the project manager, developer, or designer.TextText, of course, is a job for a writer reappearing as writing to be read.This writer may not be thewriter/designer who conceptualized the site.Text content is itself an asset.It may be writing that istechnical or that is based on specialized knowledge that has to be commissioned.Web writing dif-fers from print writing because interactivity is part of the way it is put together and contributes to theexperience of the web user.The use of colors in text and backgrounds changes the web reading expe-rience.Key words or sources offer potential links in the form of tangents, statements, and questions.Writing for web content is visual writing in that it involves media other than text.Video, Stills, and AudioImages, video, and audio clips can enhance the user experience and bolster the content.The webwriter has to write with multimedia content in mind and consider where additional content such asstill photographs, video, and audio might be appropriate.If a video clip or other media is anticipatedfor a given page, you may need a short script (we will call it a miniscript) to tell a video productioncrew what to shoot, or an audio technician what to record, or a photo researcher what picture tosearch for in the libraries or archives.Once again, this writer may not be the writer/designer who con-ceptualized the site.Applying the Seven-Step MethodTo construct a site, without a doubt, we will want to go through the first six steps of the method out-lined in Chapter 2 to come up with a concept.Many students getting involved in website construc-tion or interactive media want to compose their interactivity directly with the authoring tool andare impatient about the writing that precedes it.It is important to keep in mind that what you do inhigher education is free of commercial pressure, such as competition and cost [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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