Week 5 Assignment
1. Revamped Headlines
- Rescue plan for funds will come at a cost
Problem: Vague and obvious
Solution: U.S. Treasury Guarantees Ailing Money Markets, Stricter Regulation to Follow - Minimizing Your Own Exposure to Risks
Problem: Vague and redundant
Solution: Minimizing Your Financial Risks - Rules Near for Animals’ Engineering
Problem: Vague and confusing
Solution: FDA to Announce Regulations for Genetically Modified Animals
2. Web Article with Lists
(Original)
Keeping Your Computer and Its Contents Safe
By DAVID A. KELLY
IT’S hard not to experience anxiety when you’re traveling with a laptop. A computer can certainly make life easier for travelers keeping an online travel journal, serial e-mailers and those who want to keep up with their jobs. But there are, as every laptop-toting traveler knows, numerous risks: accidental drops during security screenings, theft from a hotel room, loss in a taxi or restaurant or hardware failure from too many jolts.
Quick Tips for Laptop Safety
- Backup your files to a flash drive or a memory card that’s compatible with your cell phone or digital camera.
- Purchase a laptop lock or alarm.
- Ask for a hotel safe when renting a room (Be sure the safe is large enough for your laptop.)
- Add your laptop to your renter’s or homeowner’s insurance.
- Use a service that allows remote access to your home computer, and leave your laptop at home.
- Tape your contact information and photo to the back of your laptop.
“Laptops are great because you can take your entire office with you wherever you go, but you need to recognize that your entire office might be lost, stolen or damaged beyond use,” said Ann Westerheim, president of Ekaru, a technology services company.
Perhaps the most important safety measure, Ms. Westerheim said, is protecting the information on your computer, so that if it is damaged, lost or stolen, the data remain safe. Travelers now have many backup devices to choose from.
Beside storing your files and data on a removable CD or DVD disk, there is a variety of other portable storage devices. Particularly convenient are flash drives: small key-chain-size plastic devices that weigh only an ounce or so and plug into a computer’s U.S.B. port (the port typically used for connecting printers and other peripherals). You can copy your e-mail files, documents, pictures or data files to the U.S.B. flash drive and can then keep the files with you or keep them in the hotel safe.
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3. Blog Headline Rewrite
Speaking Soccer in Brazil: Cheering for the Home Team, Right or Wrong
4. Writing Practice
8: China Retaliates, Suspending Import of Contaminated American Meats
6: China Suspends Contaminated American Meat Imports
6&8: China Suspends Contaminated American Meat Imports, Decision Responds to U.S. Crackdown on Chinese Products
Website Recommendations for FactCheck.org
Purpose:
The purpose of this article is to provide suggestions for the improvement of the FactCheck.org website. The application of these suggestions should provide improved navigability and readability.
About FactCheck:
FactCheck.org reviews political ads and stories for accuracy. The writing is consistently solid, well organized, objective, and concise. Therefore, the content is perfectly suited for a Web audience, and the objective tone inspires user confidence in the site. However, some of the site’s design elements make it hard to focus on the wonderful text. I often read the printer-friendly version instead of staying on the main site. FactCheck has also added a video broadcast and a blog.
Organization:
As it is, the site looks cluttered and busy.This is partly because the site only uses the center of the screen. Because the site is text heavy, this isn’t the most efficient way to use screen space.
The banner on the home page doesn’t include an image of the American flag, while the banners on the rest of the site do. I think this is because there is a graphic on the home page of the White House and an American flag. This graphic is huge and doesn’t really add anything to the site that the banner with the flag wouldn’t.
The thumbnail images included with each recent posting on the home page are unnecessary. They are too small. It would be better to choose one good graphic and feature it and nix the thumbnails.
Based on the Eyetrack findings, the site doesn’t have the right information in the upper left quadrant where users look first. There the site has a link to a video feature called “Just the Facts”. This feature will be more interesting to regular users than first-time users, so it would be beneficial to rearrange. “Recent Postings” should be on the left side of the page because this is the most important and substantive information on the site.
The “FactCheck Wire” link doesn’t have the same formatting as the rest of the screen, so it seems like the link part of the “Just the Facts” feature above it. The graphic for this feature is mostly text. It’s a nice graphic; it just doesn’t work with the other elements of the page. The red heading bars on the home page are also problematic, they draw the eye and keep people from reading the text below, and the font size in the bars is inconsistent.
Organization Recommendations:
- Use a left-justified design that uses 3/4 of the screen to create more space and still allow for screen size variability.
- Delete the White House graphic on the home page.
- Delete thumbnail images.
- Use the American flag banner on the home page.
- Move recent posting to the upper left of the page.
- Move the extras to the right and unify their presentation.
- Delete the Wire graphic and make the entry for the Wire consistent with the other features on the page.
- Use bolded text in a slightly larger font size instead of red heading bars.
Navigation:
The menu bar is clean and simple. There is also navigation at the very bottom of the page in case you’ve read to the bottom and want to link from there. However, the bottom navigation is not stylistically linked to the navigation at the top. The menu bar is also inconsistent; only the home page has an “archive” link.
There’s an “Explore FactCheck” navigation bar on some pages that does not appear consistently throughout the site. It includes links to the home pages of FactCheck’s supplemental sites (Just the Facts!, Ask Fact Check, and the FactCheck Wire). Each site has both an “archive” and “home” link, which looks busy because each link must be labeled to differentiate. Deleting the archive links would make this specification unnecessary.
Another problem is that it’s difficult to tell what exactly you are “exploring” unless you click the link, which people are hesitant to do. Two solutions would be to make the titles more descriptive or to add descriptive information. Using Javascript to show brief explanations of the sites when you mouse over them would be a space-efficient way to take care of that problem.
Moreover, when you visit the Wire there is no explanation of what it is. I looked around and found out that the Wire is basically the FactCheck blog. Smaller stories are posted on the Wire, and stories are posted more often than on the main website. The subheading “Faster than the speed of spin” suggests this, but a concrete explanation in addition to that would be useful.
Navigation Recommendations:
- Match the navigation at the bottom of the page to nav at the top.
- Add an archive link to the navigation on every page.
- Use the “Explore FactCheck” navigation bar consistently.
- Remove archive links from the Explore FactCheck nav bar.
- Describe the items in the “Explore FactCheck” bar.
Content:
The text below FactCheck.org on the banner, “Annenberg Political Fact Check,” is redundant. It’s important for the site to boldly display its affiliation to Annenberg, but the user doesn’t glean much from that subhead. Using a more descriptive subhead would be better for drawing in first time users. It should specify what sort of facts are checked.
It’s also important to consider that the user may not already be familiar with the Annenberg Public Policy Center, information about the center should be prominently displayed that let’s the user know Annenberg is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. Moving the Annenberg logo at the bottom of the page to the top will supply this information and lend the site more credibility.
The rest of the graphics at the bottom of the page are awards. A separate page for awards and press would be a great addition to the site. I know that FactCheck is often quoted in major newspapers. If the site linked to those quotes in the press section it would be good for site credibility.
The “Fact of the Day” on the homepage doesn’t really do anything for the site. It would be best to get rid of it.
Content Recommendations:
- Remove “Annenberg Political Fact Check” from below the title and use a subhead that is more descriptive.
- Move the logo from the bottom of the page that says “A project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania” to the top of the page.
- Create a page for press and awards, link it in the menu, and delete the extraneous award graphics at the bottom of the home page.
- Remove the “Fact of the Day.”
Conclusion:
FactCheck serves an important function as a political watchdog. Increasing the consistency and improving the design of the site will ultimately make FactCheck appear more credible to users, and thus, the site will be able to achieve its mission more effectively.
About the revision:
I changed the title of this article to “Website Recommendations for FactCheck.org” from “Formatting Recommendations for FactCheck.org” to make it clear what the article is about. I also added a statement of purpose to the beginning of the article. Next, I made an attempt to remove pronouns and to replace them with more precise nouns. Finally, I added a concluding section.
