Essays on History and New Media–Thoughts

I read the “Top Ten Mistakes in Academic Web Design”.  As a Communications major this is a really interesting topic to me.  I have one big component I really liked, and one big component I really didn’t like:

What I liked–I like the attention they draw to download speeds.  As time goes on, the attention span of Americans goes down more and more.  This is especially true on the internet where people often only spend one or two seconds on a webpage.  Like the article said, images take up a lot of memory and can take a long time to load, especially if the files are bigger than they need to be.

What I didn’t like–The irony in this list is that the writer describes the downfalls of “dense text” as he writes his list in dense paragraphs.  Easy to read information on the internet is best written in one-sentence paragraphs.  This can be challenging for writers to adapt to, because it forces the writer to be more concise.  Also, if he’s going to write in large paragraphs anyway, his font should be bigger and the lines should be farther apart.

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