a) My target audience are hipster-tourists who like San Francisco. Also anyone interested in the quake and a bit of history. Noel Gallagher and Oasis fans will probably find the page as well due to my concert content.
b) I planted keywords into the site, in meta and in my general story...and just enough details about events and people for bots to pick up on things. I didn't have to mention the members of Noel's new band, but if somebody google's their names, my site may come up. Directly linking to youtube videos of Noel's songs in my table probably helps as well. I linked to Noel's official homepage, which www.linkpopularity.com says has over 55,000 associated links. I added my own youtube videos which I uploaded myself...and i was sure to use lots of tags on youtube itself so people find it. I think I covered my bases.
c) I flunked out on the contrast for readability at first. I went to kuler and made up a custom color scheme. That helped quite a bit. Still, my nav buttons ended up being too dark. I thought it would be simple to use dark text with a white drop-shadow behind them, but I hit a roadblock there.
Adobe's browser tester let me know that IE9 doesn't show drop shadows. Period. It looked great in Firefox, and chrome only! I re-did my test in the nav area to be lighter, and it worked out alright after much trial and error.
My Mom gave it a looking-over, and pronounced it good and "senior-proof." She's never been able to program a VCR, bless her heart, so I feel it's probably easy enough to navigate for anyone.
d) Nothing really validates thanks to my use of drop shadows and video embed code. It does look great in many browsers though, so I am confident that it is "done right."
I experienced extreme frustration with youtube yesterday. My computer was having it's own technical issues, so when youtube randomly stopped generating link codes and embed codes, I assumed the problem was with me!
I restarted, updated flash, troubleshooted and generally wasted a good many hours trying to make my browser generate youtube code again. Only after a long while did youtube finally start generating pop-up notifications in the comment section that some services were "unavailable" did I realize it was them the whole time! >< I was right in the middle of uploading videos too, which all had to be re-done.
e) I think my images help my site to be greatly more interesting than if it was just text. In fact I'm sure it would be really boring without the images. I'm a pretty sappy romantic writer, so anybody rolling their eyes at that at least has some images to make up for it. :P
I configured still images that were small to have a green border that matched my scheme. Videos had blue. These colors are used elsewhere in the site as well and repeat.
I threw out the border and went extra-wide for some of my best shots, and placed them all in the same place at the bottom. I feel it coaxes "skimmers" who aren't really reading my content anyway to at least look at the images at the bottom, if they know they are down there on every page. Hopefully then some of my more interesting headlines grab their attention.
f) I used high-contrast for my table. White background and dark text. But not too dark, I softened it up a bit with mauve instead of a glaring-red. I kept the font simple, although I really was tempted to use Wingdings. Just kidding. :P
g) I think my media really helps my page to be interesting. I took hi-def video, which is the standard these days. I kept it short and interesting. Rare historical footage I threw in there. Excellent concert coverage with good sound. I don't think anybody needs any plugins to view it, other than perhaps flash. Using the newer code means there's no more annoying popup window. In fact the old embed code gave my computer seizures so I had to change it, wether I liked it or not.
I hope you guys like my site, it's been a good fun class. I learned a lot.
(If my site doesn't appear right away give it a little time. My media has been uploading for more than an hour now.)
Catch you on the flip side:
My San Francisco Travel Journal Page
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