Part
8 |
Audience responses and conclusion
Everyone hated Robotwisdom (no explanation of links; centered entries; dark-on-light; violation of weblog convention of having brief text along with links).
Interaction between design and content was a particularly important matter for the Winter 2004 audience. One site which drew favorable comment was Wonkette:
Great tone. Credibility is established interestingly. She uses quotes from mainstream and well-known media about her blog. The result is like the quotes you see on movie posters that allegedly come from film critics. See! Smart people like it! I love the graphic up top. It's got a sort of Dear Diary meets Encyclopedia Brown kitsch aesthetic that's appropriate to the tone of a blog run by a young woman who wants to be taken seriously without sacrificing femininity. Some people might argue with me on that. But the name, "Wonkette," seems to support the same idea. A wonk, of course, is the slang term for a policy expert.
Conclusion
It’s not appropriate to draw too specific a set of conclusions from these
comments. Students were directed to these sites rather than finding them on
their own, either through Google or through links from weblogs or weblog indexes.
These specific readers have been thinking more about web design than most. The
demographic mix may not be representative of the on-line population generally.
And the reading situation was for many more tangential than might be the case
had they encountered these sites on their own (on the other hand, web readers
frequently browse, dropping into and out of sites).
But even without reading Jakob Nielsen on
usability, audiences have formed expectations about web sites along modernist
lines: on first glance, they expect designs which give access to content, rather
than obtrusively calling attention to the design itself. Design, however, encompasses
the textual conventions by which authenticity is constructed. Site names and
banner gifs, as well as layout, are important cues for guiding expectations.
The dominance of sans-serif fonts, or familiar serif fonts such as Times New
Roman, makes those conventions hard to avoid. Flash is not in the least resisted,
so long as the site gives control to the user—splash screens and unclear
navigation, on the other hand, provide obstacles to the content. Color and other
design choices need to strike a balance between being different enough to gain
attention and not so different as to be esthetically displeasing or off-putting.
Dark text on light background is nearly obligatory for many. For the most part,
visual factors are hard to separate from sites’ content and ideological
positioning.
Particulars in constructing authenticity depend to some extent on the genre.
Tech-oriented weblogs make freer use of smaller font sizes, and larger screen
sizes; they gravitate to sans-serif fonts. Public-issue weblogs, by contrast,
stay to default font sizes and incline more to serif fonts in order to create
an association with print media. Colors are mostly varieties of blue—cool,
professional colors. Personal weblogs might use either font, but are a bit freer
in terms of color choices.