Design Guidelines
- » Apply digital rhetoric understanding and skills, composing for online audience:
webtext arrangement, with organization, links, multiple media
- Pages (sub-pages under Project 1 “parent”)
- Distribute content across multiple pages —
with purposeful/thoughtful layout (considering audience/readers and platform) - Arrange into sections (label, title pages) — plan/outline prior
-
like the general topics, for example Digital Culture, Participation, Platforms, Public Pedagogy, etc. But likely best to label in your terms.
- Distribute content across multiple pages —
- » Easiest to use your WordPress site; however, feel free to use any other platform for webtext.
General design guide — use
- Hyperlinks
- — for navigation between overall pages/sections and from within text (hyperlinked words?)
- » reminder from class: linking purposefully (deliberate sequence?); offering multiple types of navigation; linking for reading “back and forth” (reciprocally on pages)
→ Protip Use Images as Links (WP.com tutorial)
- Multiple media
» WordPress.com Support Section- Embed purposefully / thoughtfully
- Use images (pictures, graphics, GIFs, screen-capture); videos; streaming audio
— perhaps upload your own, into Media Library (strongly recommended)- *Note, suggested strategy for images: save from Web, edit, then upload to Media Library.
- Employ media in multiple ways: supplement discussion; use for various purposes/effects, such as to illustrate, express, convey, simulate, etc.
(in other words, not only representing what is discussed in text/content).
- Effective digital rhetoric: design for online readers
- — revise and edit/proofread carefully, “polishing” for “publication“
- — modify main content (essay draft) as needed, imagining audience
- (for example, creating/arranging sections regarding layout and media)
* Publish only revised, final project
- in other words, ensure all pages, links, and media elements appear & function;
revise text (not first draft!) before posting, reflecting formal academic style.
- in other words, ensure all pages, links, and media elements appear & function;
» Cheryl E. Ball further notes that webtexts take advantage of the affordances of their medium: "Webtexts are not linear articles with a few multimedia elements, such as video trailers, TED-like presentations or video supplements; they are a specific (and ever-changing) genre of peer-reviewed scholarship that uses the affordances of the Web (browser-based presentation, multimedia, hyperlinks, etc.)" and "Webtexts often need to be experimentally multimodal, merging modes and genres together in ways that are often new to readers."
— Digital Rhetoric Collaborative Wiki
» Resource: extensive WordPress Support pages
» For more advanced design (using HTML), switch from Visual Editor to “Text“
→ for example, linking to sections of a page.
Note: I often use a blank <a id="section"></a>
section label/ID.
But you can make the section heading / label the “anchor” for the link by typing:
<a id="section">Section Heading></a>
— which will make Section Heading appear as the anchor.