The Sweet Science pound 4 pound the best boxing news site on the web

Exegesis

The idea of a Web Presence has always intrigued me since I started studying and working in Web Design and Development 18 months ago. This project required us to build a small main website linking to other Web 2.0 services, which will help us create our 'Web Presence.' In my other studies outside of this course, the idea of a Web Presence also involved things such as Search Engine Optimization (Seomoz, 2010), backlinking and social networking. This project certainly attempts to get across the idea of interconnectedness of the web by requiring 'Contributing nodes' that brings a single Web Presence together. In this exegesis I will I explain the choices I have made in constructing my 'Boxing journalist' 'web presence', and also the reasons behind choosing my contributing nodes.

Tam the Boxing journalist & The Target Audience

I am a big sports fan, especially boxing, therefore I felt it fitting to create my 'Web Presence' as a boxing journalist, author of 'theSweetScience' website. The goal of the main node is to provide the latest up to date news, opinions and commentary as well as videos (which is provided by the youtube node), external boxing news sources (delicious) and live updates (Twitter). Because of the required functionality, I've chosen WordPress to build my central node, firstly because I'm familiar with it, and secondly it is an extremely flexible platform that can easily be customized to build any sort of site.

I built this 'Web Presence' and especially the main node with a very targeted audience in mind. The hanging boxing gloves, the term 'pound 4 pound' and the picture of Mike Tyson (One of the great former champions), will not mean a lot to a majority of users, but it will make sense to those that it is directed towards. I wanted to create a 'nostalgic' feel, which is the reason for the 'old school gym' look. Contradictorily, the site has very modern aspects- such as the layout, fonts and styling, but this could not be helped for the sole purpose of creating an user friendly, accessible site (Nielsen, 2010).

Colours, Style and Layout

The colour scheme I used for my 'Web Presence' was black and gold for the graphics, while red links and black text was used a white background. Black and Gold are not predominantly traditional 'boxing colours' as black and red is, however I decided to go for the 'old school gym' look, which also helps to mould the tone of the site as a serious, professional news and opinion source to the more niched boxing community. I decided not to mess around with the font styling (I used the default 'arial' font) for the sake of usability purposes, which also explains why black on white text was chosen and links are underlined (Nielsen, 2010).

For the layout of my main node i have chosen the LightWord (Luca, 2010) WordPress theme , which as you can see I have modified. The lightWord theme is a 3-column layout with a central sidebar and a modified top banner. The reason for this configuration is that I felt that it was a familiar, 'modern' look that users would easily be able to navigate around the site- The navigation is clear to see, while graphics and large text on the sidebar easily direct user's eyes to the contributing plugins (Nielsen, 2010), while the less important (to users that is) links such as the 'site admin stuff' are down the bottom. I've also included social bookmarking buttons and enabled comments to encourage interaction, communication and dialogue on the site as well (Boyd & Ellison, 2007).

Youtube, Twitter and Delicious

The point of picking Youtube as one of the secondary nodes is because I needed media to provide the user with a 'rich user experience' (O'Reilly, 2005). The fact that I could update videos via Youtube and then embed them into the site made Youtube a very attractive choice. The reasoning behind picking Twitter as a secondary node is similar to my reasoning behind choosing Youtube, as it allows the users to greatly engage themselves into the site. However, I believe Twitter provides much more than that. The increase usages in mobile technologies and technological and in-built backing for Twitter (Evangelista, 2009) has meant that users can user twitter anywhere. Therefore having Twitter as a secondary node to my site meant that users were granted greater potential interaction to my 'web presence' by 'tuning' in to my tweets. They could then comment on the site via comment forms or 'tweet back'; all of this encourages a constant dialogue or 'conversation' (Boyd & Ellison, 2007) on a very niche topic.

Delicous was a big question mark for me. I will be honest and say that I am not completely comfortable with the choice. My initial choice was Flickr however there were many potential legal pitfalls in using photos that are not mine, as I could not find any appropriate images with the right attribution license (Flickr, 2010). My second choice was a sports betting plugin but the technical difficulties and lack of time meant it wasn't possible (Plus their was no supporting plugins anyway, meaning I had to code it myself). In the end I settled with Delicious because I felt it could be used as an external news source that would complement the site. Of course, in a real project I would use RSS to bring news from multiple sources, however, it was necessary to make visually clear what the actual contributing node was.

The choices I have made in this project have allowed me to create an mini interconnecting internet 'Web Presence' of an web 'Boxing journalist.' I have created a main web node that connects with its target audience through its overall design layout and by providing up to date content. By using the web applications used to create the secondary nodes, Twitter, Youtube and Delicious, I have attempted to greatly enhance user interaction and provide a 'rich user experience' (O'Reilly, 2005).

Word Count: 984

REFERENCE LIST

Boyd, D., & Ellison, N. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Retrieved February 3, 2010, from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Delicious. (2010). Delicious: Social Bookmarking. Retrieved January 31, 2010, from http://delicious.com/

Evangelista, B. (2009). New mobile device does Twitter and only Twitter. Retrieved February 7, 2010, from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=50840

Flickr. (2010). Flickr: Creative Commons Attribution License. Retrieved February 2, 2010, from http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/

Luca, A. (2010). LightWord for WordPress. Retrieved February 1, 2010, from http://www.lightwordtheme.com/

Nielsen, J. (2010). Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability. Retrieved February 1, 2010, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. Retrieved January 19, 2010, from http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1

Seomoz. (2010). Beginner's Guide to SEO. Retrieved January 22, 2010, from http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-1-page

Twitter. (2010). Twitter. Retrieved February 1, 2010, from http://twitter.com/

WordPress. (2010). WordPress: Blog Tool and Publishing Platform. Retrieved January 31, 2010, from http://wordpress.org/

Youtube. (2010). Youtube - Broadcast Yourself. Retrieved January 31, 2010, from http://www.youtube.com/

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