Lauren Sharp's EPJ Blog~ Multimedia Critique

I looked at the Sedalia Democrat's website for this assignment, viewing their slide show of the local high school's homecoming parade. I do think this was a good way to show some of the pictures taken, because obviously they couldn't put them all in the newspaper. You had the option to just click through the pictures in a gallery-style format, or to click "play" and watch them as a slide show. It did take a few seconds for each picture to load, and because of the picture's position on the page you had to scroll down a bit to see the whole shot. As each subsequent picture came up you had to scroll back down to see it all again, something I found a bit annoying. Also, some of the pictures had captions and others did not. I personally am of the opinion that if you want captions they should be on all of the pictures. I think it looks silly if all of a sudden there's not one, and the first time it happens it confuses me because I think there's something wrong. I was always able to go up and click the "pause" button, and when I did that it would show me the "previous" and "next" buttons. The layout matched the rest of the site (which I find a bit boring, but it's easily readable, navigable, etc), and the images were clear. There was no sound with the show and I think it would have been neat to have some audio of the band/crowd underneath the pictures.

Lauren Sharp's EPJ Blog~ Portfolio Site Critique

For this critique I looked at a couple different sites before I decided to use C.S. Ling Photography, mostly because his site was the one I felt I had the most to say about. He specializes in nature, wildlife and travel. The pictures were awesome, but the website could use some major work. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with portfolio sites, but I found his to be the most difficult to navigate of the sites I looked at. To start, there are no tabs. So when I navigated away from the home page there was no back button to use and no tab at the top for me to click on. I took a guess and clicked on his logo, and that took me back to the main page. Had I not been familiar with browsing the web I'm not sure I would have tried to do that so quickly. Then, there are two line-like option things at the top that allow me to look for pictures using specific requirements. While this could be useful were I needing something that specific, I don't find it very asthetically pleasing to have it right at the top of the page. On the side, at the bottom, even in the middle between two items would be better than right at the top of the page. Again, maybe this is just showing my lack of familiarity with these sites, but I didn't see any others that were set up this way. When I finally got to the pictures and started trying to click through, I had to go back to the main gallery page each time I wanted to change pictures. There were no links on a picture's page to take me on to the next picture. No, it's really not that big of a deal. In the long run it doesn't save me a whole lot of time. But it's something that we, or at least I, have gotten used to being able to do while looking at photos online, and I found it extremely annoying that I had to go back each time. I suppose if I had a mouse it might have been less of a big deal, but since I'm not using one, it mattered to me. He had some neat pictures, but I got frustrated with having to click back and forth each time I wanted to see a new one, making me less inclined to look very far into them.