Module 6 – question 2: improve a web article with lists

assignment: find a web article that could be improved with lists. Show before and after

While disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley’s sudden fall from power Friday in a sex scandal has already led content from his official website to be scrubbed, and his campaign website  is already dead, the Way Back Machine at archive.org has a last site snapshot of his campaign website from May 1, 2005 that allows us to look back to see his web skills.

OLD

http://web.archive.org/web/20041011014135/markfoley.com/contents/about/

About Mark Foley

Representing the second-largest district in the state, Congressman Mark Foley, first elected to Congress in the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” is now serving his fifth term as the U.S. Representative from Florida’s 16th congressional district.

Mark, a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and a member of Republican Leadership as a Deputy Majority Whip, has emerged as a conservative leader.

Several conservative national groups have praised Mark for fighting to protect children, seniors and veterans, controlling federal spending, protecting Second Amendment rights, promoting fiscal responsibility and providing real tax relief to hard-working Americans. The National Taxpayers Union, National Rifle Association (NRA), John Walsh and the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Businesses are just a few of the many organizations that have praised Mark’s efforts.

Mark plays a powerful role on the Ways and Means Committee by reforming the tax code, providing tax relief, expanding trade while protecting Florida’s farmers, seeking solutions to save Social Security, shoring up Medicare, reforming welfare and fighting child exploitation.

In addition to his committee assignments, Mark serves as Chairman of the Entertainment Industry Task Force, Co-Chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus and Co-Chairman of the Travel and Tourism Caucus.

With Mark’s ever-growing influence come many legislative accomplishments. He secured the first-ever financial commitment from Congress to begin the preservation of Florida’s Everglades; passed legislation that expedites the deportation of non-violent criminal aliens serving their sentences in federal prisons; succeeded in passing a law allowing volunteer youth-serving organizations like the Boy Scouts and Boys and Girls Clubs to have access FBI fingerprint background checks to protect children; and he eliminated federal prohibitions on notifying a campus community when a student commits a violent crime.

Mark also successfully sought a solution for surviving heirs of Holocaust victims who have been unable to collect on life insurance policies owed to them. He also helped Attorney General John Ashcroft write legislation to ban “virtual child pornography” and introduced
legislation to ban “child erotica” websites.

NEW:

About Mark Foley

Representing the second-largest district in the state, Congressman Mark Foley, first elected to Congress in the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” is now serving his fifth term as the U.S. Representative from Florida’s 16th congressional district.

Mark, a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and a member of Republican Leadership as a Deputy Majority Whip, has emerged as a conservative leader.

Several conservative national groups have praised Mark for:

• fighting to protect children, seniors and veterans
• controlling federal spending
• protecting Second Amendment rights
• promoting fiscal responsibility and providing real tax relief to hard-working Americans.

The National Taxpayers Union, National Rifle Association (NRA), John Walsh and the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Businesses are just a few of the many organizations that have praised Mark’s efforts.

Mark plays a powerful role on the Ways and Means Committee by:

• reforming the tax code
• providing tax relief
• expanding trade while protecting Florida’s farmers
• seeking solutions to save Social Security, shoring up Medicare
• reforming welfare
• fighting child exploitation.

In addition to his committee assignments, Mark serves as:

• Chairman of the Entertainment Industry Task Force
• Co-Chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus
• Co-Chairman of the Travel and Tourism Caucus.

With Mark’s ever-growing influence come many legislative
accomplishments, as he:

• secured the first-ever financial commitment from Congress to begin the preservation of Florida’s Everglades
• passed legislation that expedites the deportation of non-violent criminal aliens serving their sentences in federal prisons
• succeeded inpassing a law allowing volunteer youth-serving organizations like the
  Boy Scouts and Boys and Girls Clubs to have access FBI fingerprint background checks to protect children
• eliminated federal prohibitions on notifying a campus community when a student commits a violent crime
• successfully sought a solution for surviving heirs of Holocaust victims who have been unable to collect on life insurance policies owed to them
• helped Attorney General John Ashcroft write legislation to ban “virtual child pornography”
• introduced legislation to ban “child erotica” websites.

Module 6 – question 1: fix 3 bad headlines

assignment: find three examples online of headlines used as links and fix them

1) Espn.com has a habit of writing extremely short teaser headlines on its index page, with a longer head on the linked story. (in this case, the headline at the destination link already meets the guidelines) These teaser headlines are written from an insider perspective.

posted headline at http://www.espn.com: “Unit in doubt for playoffs”

linked headline at http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2607742:

“Yanks’ Johnson has herniated disc, playoffs in doubt”

The initial headline makes the quantum link of faith that the reader knows that “Unit”, is short for “Big Unit”, which is MLB pitcher Randy Johnson’s nickname. The “playoffs” reference makes sense only if you then realize based on “Unit” that it is the baseball playoffs, set to start on Tuesday, October 3. The rewritten headline on the inside at espn.com gives the user sufficient information. For the next two examples, I’ll rewrite the headline myself.

2) “Saints come marching in”. Lead headline link Saturday at http://www.panthers.com

suggested rewrite:

“Saints come marching in: October 1 Panthers gameday preview”

While a cute play on the famous New Orleans Jazz anthem, the headline does not convey enough information. Is it a music review? A Big Easy travel promotion? Nope, a preview of the October 1 Saints-Panthers NFL clash.

3. “Chow attacks man on greenway”

headline at http://www.charlotte.com

what attacked the man? Some food? Former NC State offensive football coordinator Norm Chow? A dog? Where was the attack?

suggested rewrite:

“Dog attacks jogger on Gastonia greenway”

Module 6 – question 3: rewrite headline

assignment: rewrite the headline from your article from earlier modules with this week’s module in mind 

The title to my initial writing assignments was simply

“Circle”

A title should sell the story, get attention, summarize, facilitate scanning to help determine what to read, depict mood and tone, tell the news, and tell it clearly (Writing Better Headlines) It should attract the reader’s attention, summarize, help the reader index, and depict mood and tone (Brooks and Scissors 2000, cited in Course Book)

My headline was too cute by a mile. It was more akin to a title of a poem than a title to an online writing. It’s motif was to give the reader a clue that the story was a chronological narrative, the climax of which was to return to the beginning (hence “Circle”).  It required quite a bit to understand that.

A much better title a headline would retain the message while conveying more information.  My revised title would be:

Vietnam 1969-2001: Circle;

Two generations discover war protests

This title will convey the same message more succinctly, as well as grabbing the attention of the reader. It conveys the tone of the piece.

Module 5 – Recommendations to Improve Presentation at Carolinahurricanes.com

Improving Presentation at Carolinahurricanes.com

Assignment

Choose a Web site you visit regularly, one where you read a lot of the content. You have been hired as the site’s editor-in-chief. Make specific recommendations to improve the presentation, integrating this week’s module. What elements or features promote consumption of the site (again, think of all the elements described in this module)? How are graphics and visuals incorporated in the site and do they encourage or discourage use of the site? How? Post critique to your course blog.

Site target

Official website of the NHL Carolina Hurricanes hockey club: http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/

Resources

Lynch and Horton’s Web Style Guide 2 (2001) makes numerous suggestions to achieve success in building a website.  Nathan Wallace’s Web Writing for Many Interest Levels (1999) also has useful tips, as does the Course Book for JoMC 711.  Fagerjord’s “Rhetorical Convergence; Studying Web Media” (2003) helps us analyze the uses of different media in a website.  I have compared the official website of the NHL Stanley Cup Champion Carolina Hurricanes hockey club against many of those tips to see if the website is also of championship calibre. 

Use and Integration of Multimedia

Carolinahurricanes.com does not make extensive use of graphics and visuals in a manner to most effectively promote use of the site. This lack of promotion is in spite of extensive video archives on the site. Still photo archives are less extensive.  Multimedia on the site is NOT transparent to the user.

The index page customarily has one or two photographs, normally a still of the most recent game, or a lookahead to the next game with a photo of a previous game between the two teams. Front page stories often have a small graphic at the left fronting a one sentence or one paragraph intro, but the graphics themselves are not links to the live stories as is true in many other sites. The link is in the text. The one sentence or one paragraph intros, suggested by Web Style Guide 2 as a feature, are well written and allow the interested reader to jump to the story if interested in more detail. Permanent graphics (such as pictures of the broadcasters) are live links, and offer ties to team broadcasters Chuck Kaiton, John Forslund, and Tripp Tracy’s blogs. Those broadcasters are team employees.

Coverage of the most recent game has highlight video and a nicely presented photo gallery,  but to get to the archived game video and multimedia, one must follow an intricate path down four levels, hardly intuitive. Users who want to find game video or archived interviews with current players or legends find a difficult task.  On the right menu bar there is a Multimedia link, going Multimedia>Canesvision>Historical vault>Game night archive.

There is an easier way to the video, a link at the very bottom of the index page. It is the last entry under a subheader “Last five games”, to the “hurricanes.com vault,” which enables the user to get to the historical vault of game videos with one less click.  I’m puzzled why this link should be under “last five games”.  

On the right menu bar, the link “.com vault” also takes the user directly to ”Historical vault”, but the user is unlikely to look for that shortcut since the name does not suggest the content. Even at those lower levels, there is little consistency. Some games are simply links to nhl.com stories, with more stats but less multimedia.  Some links take the user to entertaining in-house videos shown on the jumbotron at that particular game.

Consideration should be given to higher profile featuring of the videos, photos, and audio. There needs to be a page concentrating on how to access the multimedia, what content is available, and how far back the archives go. The team has a heavy investment here, since the radio and TV broadcasters are team employees, hardly a reason to hide their work product in such a disorganized fashion. Multimedia needs to be more transperent to the user.

Technical Recommendations

Next, some technical recommendations based on suggestions in Web Style Guide 2: 

1) Informative headers and footers to help users printing out pages from the site identify where they came from. The site appears to have neither headers or footers. Inclusion of headers and footers will assist users printing pages identify the document source.

2) Show the creator of the page is useful to enhance credibility of the site, and to allow feedback. Six pages were selected at random, two press releases (one the most recent on the site, the second being the oldest on the site), a player bio, the club employee directory,  the current season schedule, and a major section index page.  While the press releases showed the name of the author (with no individual contact information), none of the other pages indicated the creator.  Source code was examined, 215 printed pages in all for the six pages studied. Consistently indicating the page creator will enhance site credibility and enable user feedback.

3) Each page should have a title (ususally embedded in the HTML coding), which is especially useful if the user prints a page with title on, bookmarks the page, or enters the page directly rather than through the index page. The site is inconsistent on its treatment of page titles. While the pages for individual players on the under Team>Roster are titled with the name of the player, jumping to the voluminous press release archive at News>Storm Center News just shows a generic “Carolina Hurricanes – News Page” as the title for every entry. Having a page title will assist users bookmarking the site, as well as those entering directly from a search engine or other link to a sub-page.

4) Include page dates to help the user see how frequently the site is updated, and how fresh is the information. The same six pages examined under “creator” above were examined examined for page dates. None of the pages had dates embedded in the source code, nor at the bottom of the page. Only one of the two press releases was dated, with the earliest one appears to be from 1999 as it mentions Hurricanes Floyd having caused cancellation of a preseason game. I also looked at the contests and sweepstakes page, and noted that the Play with the Canes promotion from Winter 2005 would be returning in Winter 2006. (since we are already six months past the end of that winter, I can presume it did not return). Lack of page dates reduce the credibility of information. Sports users are especially interested in current information, or the date of revision of archived or historical information.

5) Have the homepage URL appear on each page on the site to assist the user in keeping track of location. Except in the body of a few pages, the index page URL http://www.carolinahurricanes.com never appears on the site.  it should consistently appear on each page. While the top of each page does have a Hurricane logo that consistently returns the user to the index page, this is not a good substitute.

6) As suggested by accessibity guides, use “ALT” tags in HTML on images to allow those without graphics (or who have turned off graphics because of slow download time or other reasons) to view the name of the image. The index page at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com has ALT tags on  just 2 of the 19 images, caniacworld  at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/canesworld/default.asp has 2 of 11, and the image gallery appears have no graphics tagged. ALT tags should be added to each image.

7) Have consistent and predictable navigation, including going back and going to the previous page.  Navigation aides on the carolinahurricanes.com are quite predictible, nine major menu choices just below the team logos at the top of each page, with java-based pulldowns in most broswers, and when one of the major menus is selected, what had been the drop down menu appears as menu choices on the left of each page. The back browser button works throughout the site.  The only part of the site that appears to have internal back-and-forth navigation is Storm Center News at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/news/news.asp That site has arrows for the previous and next page, bu no overall index or table of contents, and only the URL for the most recent news release at http://www.carolinahurricanes.com/news/news.asp?articleid=1606 gives the user warning that there are 1606 releases on the site to go back through (actually there are just 1600 as the first six have been scrubbed. Additional navigation needs to be added to the press release archive.

Conclusion

 http://www.carolinahurricanes.com contains extensive text and multimedia content. The content is neither organized nor presented in a way the encourage use of the multimedia. Other website presentation does not conform to generally used style guides. Significant improvement can be made.

Assignment 3 – second revisal

This is the second revisal of assignment 3, nearly finished with initial formatting for web publishing

———

There are two audiences for this travelogue, those interested in world travel and those interested in the Vietnam War (called the “American War” by the Vietnamese)

Circle

The Darkest Hour

The chartered buses pulled out of the Morehead Planetarium parking lot in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on an early autumn morning in 1969. The sun was at least 20 degrees below the eastern horizon. A pre-dawn departure was needed to make it to Washington in time for the massive Vietnam Moratorium demonstration. As Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas sang in 1967, the darkest hour is just before dawn. I certainly felt the country was in darkness. One of my vivid memories of the crush of 100,000 or more demonstrators as the Washington Monument was standing against a barricade.

The Draft

In the autumn of 2000, during his senior year in high school, my son Aaron enrolled in a class entitled “Lessons of the Vietnam War”. As the class progressed, he’d come running to me with news like “Did you know you were #37 in the draft lottery?” Painfully, I told him I already knew. In the autumn of 1971, I had gotten one of the famous “Greetings from the President” letters, ordering me to report for a pre-induction physical in Raleigh. Lifelong asthma resulted in my failing the induction physical, so my trip to Vietnam was postponed.

Vietnam Omen

In early December 2000, Aaron told me where he wanted to go for his high school graduation trip. Vietnam. That same morning, I had received an email from Intrepid Travel, selling spots on a group tour to Vietnam. I immediately decided these two events were an omen, and told Aaron I would go with him on the long postponed trip.

Eastbound to Hanoi

We left Raleigh-Durham International Airport on a mid-July morning in 2001, bound for Hanoi on an east-bound route that required two-nights aboard a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet and a plane change for the Singapore-Hanoi leg. Our business class tickets (called “Raffles Class” by Singapore Airlines) on the jumbo jet put us almost in the lap of luxury. We were below the opulence of first class, but had two days of gourmet meals and plenty of leg room. Arriving in Hanoi two days before the tour departed, we had a harrowing taxi ride to the Hanoi Hilton. Much of those two days were spent touring the city via ciclo, pedal-powered transit with a hired driver. A visit to the North Vietnamese POW prison, nicknamed “Hanoi Hilton“, where John McCain spent several years in isolation, was a shock. The long line at the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh was worth the wait. Actually, there were separate lines for Vietnamese and foreigners to let the locals speed through. We saw the renowned water puppet theatre, and were amazed to get excellent meals for just a dollar American. I quote the price in dollars because the dollar was accepted everywhere in Vietnam we traveled. Menus in most restaurants we frequented were in Vietnamese, English, and French.

Tour Begins

Checking out of the real Hanoi Hilton on day three, we meandered across the city to meet the tour, dodging the ever-present buzz of small motorbikes that crowded the narrow streets. In Ho Chi Minh City at the end of the tour, the small motorbikes crowded wide avenues. The Intrepid Travel tour consisted of 12 travelers plus a group leader The group was all English-speaking, an Aussie, two Kiwis, two Brits, five Americans, and two Canadians. Our tour included transport on an overnight train, small buses, and one plane flight. We had suits tailored in Hoi An, swam in the warm waters of Ha Long Bay in the South China Sea, had a boat ride up the Perfume River towards Laos, and saw the Imperial Capital ruins at Hue.

Khe Sanh Haggling

Aaron and I separated from the official itinerary only once, for a battlefield tour. We went to the former demilitiarized zone (DMZ) between the then two Vietnams, then slightly south to Khe Sanh, a marine base that was held under siege by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during the 1968 Tet Offensive. As we walked to the abandoned airstrip, a gaggle of boys approached us selling trinkets. This sales technique was common everywhere we went in Vietnam. One boy spoke to us in near-perfect English, offering to sell us American pennies he said the Marines had left behind when the base was abandoned in 1968. His price was two-for-a-dollar. Aaron asked to look at the pennies and remarked, “These are 1981 pennies, the base was abandoned in 1968.” Without a pause the boy said, “OK, three-for-a-dollar.”

The Picture

Our last stop on the tour was Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, where we visited the Museum of War Remnants. That museum had been known as the War Crimes Museum prior to Vietnam opening up to American tourists just two years earlier. One museum wing had a theme “Protests of the American War Around the World”. The left wall was full of pictures of Vietnam War protests in the United States, and one picture that caught our eyes was a scene of several young Americans at the Washington Monument, pressed against a barricade. I was in the photograph, a picture that had previously been only in my memory.

Closure

That end to the trip was a closure of sorts for me. My mind looped back more than 30 years, when young idealists joined together in Washington. Traveling to Vietnam was not one of the things we wanted to do.

Assignment 3 – first revisal

This is the first revisal of assignment 3, incorporating suggestions made in the critiques of the instructor and my writing partner. It has not yet been formatted for web publishing.

———

There are two audiences for this travelogue, those interested in world travel and those interested in the Vietnam War (called the “American War” by the Vietnamese)

Circle

The chartered buses pulled out of the Morehead Planetarium parking lot on an early autumn morning in 1969. The sun was at least 20 degrees below the eastern horizon. A pre-dawn departure was needed to make it to Washington in time for the massive Vietnam Moratorium demonstration.  As Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas sang in 1967, the darkest hour is just before dawn. I certainly felt the country was in darkness. One of my vivid memories of the crush of 100,000 or more demonstrators as the Washington Monument was standing against a barricade.

In the autumn of 2000, during his senior year in high school, my son Aaron enrolled in a class entitled “Lessons of the Vietnam War”. As the class progressed, he’d come running to me with news like “Did you know you were #37 in the draft lottery?” Painfully, I told him I already knew. In the autumn of 1971, I had gotten one of the famous “Greetings from the President” letters, ordering me to report for a pre-induction physical in Raleigh. Lifelong asthma resulted in my failing the induction physical, so my trip to Vietnam was postponed.

In early December 2000, Aaron told me where he wanted to go for his high school graduation trip. Vietnam. That same morning, I had received an email from Intrepid Travel, selling spots on a group tour to Vietnam. I immediately decided these two events were an omen, and told Aaron I would go with him on the long postponed trip.

We left Raleigh-Durham International Airport on a mid-July morning in 2001, bound for Hanoi on an east-bound route that required two-nights aboard a Singapore Airlines jumbo jet and a plane change for the Singapore-Hanoi leg. Our business class tickets on the jumbo jet put us almost in the lap of luxury. We were below the opulence of first class, but had two days of gourmet meals and plenty of leg room.  Arriving in Hanoi two days before the tour departed, we had a harrowing taxi ride to the Hanoi Hilton. Much of those two days were spent touring the city via ciclo, pedal-powered transit with a hired driver. A visit to the North Vietnamese POW prison, nicknamed “Hanoi Hilton”, where John McCain spent several years in isolation, was a shock. The long line at the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh was worth the wait. Actually, there were separate lines for Vietnamese and foreigners to let the locals speed through. We saw the renowned puppet theatre, and were amazed to get excellent meals for just a dollar American. I quote the price in dollars because the dollar was accepted everywhere in Vietnam we traveled.  Menus in most restaurants we frequented were in Vietnamese, English, and French.

Checking out of the real Hanoi Hilton on day three, we meandered across the city to meet the tour, dodging the ever-present buzz of small motorbikes that crowded the narrow streets. In Ho Chi Minh City at the end of the tour, the small motorbikes crowded wide avenues.  The Intrepid Travel tour consisted of 12 travelers plus a group leader  The group was all English-speaking, an Aussie, two Kiwis, two Brits, five Americans, and two Canadians. Our tour included transport on an overnight train, small buses, and one plane flight. We had suits tailored in Hoi An, swam in the warm waters of Ha Long Bay in the South China Sea, had a boat ride up the Perfume River towards Laos, and saw the Imperial Capital ruins at Hue.

Aaron and I separated from the official itinerary only once, for a battlefield tour. We went to the former demilitiarized zone (DMV) between the then two Vietnams, then slightly south to Khe Sanh, a marine base that was held under siege by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong during the 1968 Tet Offensive. As we walked to the abandoned airstrip, a gaggle of boys approached us selling trinkets. This sales technique was common everywhere we went in Vietnam. One boy spoke to us in near-perfect English, offering to sell us American pennies he said the Marines had left behind when the base was abandoned in 1968. His price was two-for-a-dollar. Aaron asked to look at the pennies and remarked, “These are 1981 pennies, the base was abandoned in 1968.” Without a pause the boy said, “OK, three-for-a-dollar.”

Our last stop on the tour was Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, where we visited the Museum of War Remembrance. That museum had been known as the War Crimes Museum prior to Vietnam opening up to American tourists just two years earlier.  One museum wing had a theme “Protests of the American War Around the World”. The left wall was full of picures of Vietnam War protests in the United States, and one picture that caught our eyes was a scene of several young Americans at the Washington Monument, pressed against a barricade. I was in the photograph, a picture that had previously been only in my memory.

That end to the trip was a closure of sorts for me. My mind looped back more than 30 years, when young idealists joined together in Washington. Traveling to Vietnam was not one of the things we wanted to do.