Web Design Journal: First Meeting with Client

Today I had my first meeting with my client, a small non-profit looking to establish an online presence which promotes transparency, establishes their authority and builds the confidence of their local (donating) community. It was an interesting experience because my primary contact for the web design project had obvious experience using the web for her own purposes, such as searching for products and surfing for general interests, but was inexperienced in the possibilities of exploiting the web to build relationships that would drive use of the proposed website.

One of our readings for class studied the various literacies young people have and use for various activities, most specifically to foster their social relationships through instant messaging. The reading made a point to distinguish between the deep, reflective reading that is taught and valued in academic environments, (which adults value), and the social literacy that young people adopt in the management of multiple social communication networks, often simultaneously. (Lewis & Fabos, 2005 ) This makes me wonder if my client is expressing her perspective of the use of the web onto her ideas for the use of the website.

For instance, I asked if she would be interested in allowing visitors to the site to upload their picture, to which she responded, "no." I didn't ask her for details for why she was opposed to the suggestion, but I made note to create a sample page of how allowing visitors to create content would be beneficial by showing examples of use of the organization's facilities or participation in the organization's events. However, she did show great openness to my needs as a student for my assignment and so I know I'll be able to create a social media rich site from which she can choose the elements her organization is interested in using.

Web Design Journal: Linking Accounts and Getting Started

One thing my social media class will do for me is get me more active on my LinkedIn account, as well as using Twitter to make conversation. The first thing our professor had us do was embed our tweets in both the Facebook and the LinkedIn accounts, which I did with my original Twitter account. I'm not so keen having Twitter on Facebook as none of the people I hang out with on Facebook care about "information." However, I definitely see the advantage of syncing the tweets to LinkedIn as I want to use both to attest to my information expertise. (Update: I figured out how to direct my tweets to just a specific group of people on fb. And, I notice, it only displays my tweets, not the tweets of those I'm following.)

My original Twitter account is @superbrarian, but as my prof wants all of our pages to be consistently branded, and Facebook and LinkedIn both say (Lynnette) Angie Hernandez, I decided to create another username rather than change @superbrarian. Well that was a hassle. Two Twitter accounts cannot share the same email, so I then had to create a new email address. And then, because I didn't want to have to remember a whole new login and password (I already have one for work,one for school and two personal emails), I enabled my preferred email to access the new one. I also had to go into Twitter and revoke permissions for LinkedIn and Facebook, wait for those accounts to "realize" they no longer had access to the @superbrarian feed (which took a few hours), and then re-set up the Twitter app again for the new Twitter account. Phew! Lesson to take away: Decide first which accounts will talk to each other, then act.

Here's the kicker, though... Once this course is over, I'll want to revert to @superbrarian, as that's how I've branded my vanity URL. Argh!!!

Web Design Journal: First Impressions of Social Media

One of the assignments for my social media course is to design an interactive website which makes use of embedded social media. The first steps to figuring out what sort of social media I'll want to use in my site design is to first sign up for the major social media networks

• Twitter
• Facebook
• a blog service (this one)

to become familiar with the purpose, audience, uses, positives and negatives, and to also sign up for my choice of at least one major social media news source

• Mashable
• AllTop (a news feeder/aggregator)
• ReadWriteWeb

to remain current in what is happening with social media, the latest developments and so forth. The first thing that I'll have to say is that I'm going to have to be very mindful as to my purpose to going to these resources so that I stay on topic and within my allotted reading time. (Only so much time for so much news.)

I say this because I love to surf the web and these resources are really good at providing interesting links. For instance, instead of wanting to read about Google+'s search engine changes to retrieve stuff that is "personal", I read about the Open Sourced Star Wars parody. Both of which are social media related. So I'm becoming more aware of my habits and telling myself stay on target, deciding beforehand what sort of news to look for, then seek it, find it, read it and move on.