Posting for 2/9

The homepage design: I’ve had several ideas about how to best to represent myself in my homepage. The one I like the most is to have a black and white portrait of myself, cut up into pieces on the site’s main page. These individual “pieces of me” will link to other portions of the site, i.e. one piece will lead to a resume, one will lead to my hobbies, and so forth. Letting visitors click individual pieces of the portrait to discover different facets of me will allow them to feel like they are actively involved in getting to know me…the little that they will actually be finding out.

I think that this metaphor—looking into the pieces of me—can be carried out through the entirety of the site and will use the three principles of interaction that Meadows details: Input/Output, Inside/Outside, and Open/Closed.

With each input of the visitor’s clicks, the output would be another piece of my narrative. The visitor’s actions/inputs will determine the information/outputs they receive. Another piece of the output will be a changing picture upon clicking. As the visitor goes to different portions, upon returning to the main page, the visited link will now be a piece of a different color portrait. The more pieces of the site the visitor visits, the more pieces of the new portrait the visitor will see.

The changing portrait will also incorporate Meadows’s interaction principle of Inside/Outside. The visitor will know that they have already visited a portion of my site and internalized its knowledge (Inside) by the changed portion of the portrait (Outside). I really didn’t get this principle, so this was my best shot at it.

As for Open/Closed interaction, the website will allow the visitor to navigate to any portion they so choose and view what they wish at anytime (Open), but the visitor will be restricted to availability of the things they can see. The webpage is a closed system that the visitor can openly explore.

Observation, exploration, modification, and reciprocal change will be seen throughout my homepage. The ideas of observation and exploration are pretty self-explanatory. The visitor will be able to view and look at what ever they choose to view. The idea of modification will be accomplished by allowing the visitor to change the portrait on the main page through clicking through the websites various sections. Not only will the visitor be able to modify the image they had of me mentally, they will be able to modify an actual image of me. Reciprocal change will be accomplished by changing the mental image the visitor had of me. They will be able to change the actual image of me, but by changing that actual image, their mental image will be changed by the information they acquire.

The last thing that I’ve been considering about my webpage is having a conventional menu either along the top or the bottom. Only having the portrait provide the links may confuse the visitor and they may not realize that clicking the pieces of the portrait will yield a change. This is where the conventional menu/navigation bar will come into action. Navigating through it will also make the corresponding changes to the portrait and will allow the visitor to return to portions of the website hey wish to quicker and with more assurity.