The Psychology of Home Page architechture....What a concept. My feeling towards the developement and meaning of home page architechture are purely personal ones and do not reflect the feelings of my classmates or my instructor. Standard disclaimer.
- What is a Home Page?
- Why are people so involved in it?
- How am I involved in it?
- What principles of Home Page architecture would you advocate?
- What is the Social Psychological significance of Home Pages in society now and in the future?
1.) A Home Page is usually filled with information, both useful and fun, as well as an arena to vent one's feelings or views.
2.) People are involved in it because it allows them access to various pieces of information that might otherwise be hard or even impossible to get. It also allows other to "reach out and touch" a great number of people. Home Pages also allows people to express their personal views, thoughts, and perspectives on all the events and happenings around them.
3.) The reason that I am involved in it is mainly because it is a class requirement. But after doing it for awhile and seeing how my classmate's Home Pages are developing, it became a challenge, almost an obsession, to create something that is at least comparable to what they are doing. It also allows me to express myself and to show the other people a little bit of my personality without words.
4.) The principles that I would advocate to people who want to create their own Home Pages are:
Try to learn as much as possible about the language that is used.
- Read about how different mark-up tags are used and try to learn as many as possible.
- View the source pages to see how other people used certain tags and incorperated them into the page that you are viewing.
- Surf the Internet. There are a lot of sites out there that can help you create a better Home Page.
- Remember, there is no such thing as a "stupid" question. ( Well, almost no such thing. ) If you don't know, ask someone.
Try tp pick-up some software that will help you in the creation of your Home Page.
- There are a lot of freeware and shareware programs out on the Internet for you to download and use. I picked up HTML Assistant and found it very useful. It has most of the standard mark-up tags that I use most often.
- There is also an add on to Microsoft Word called Wordia that can be downloaded to your own computer. It adds the *.html to your save options and also come with a viewer program so you can see what your Home Page looks like before everyone else does.
- For the more advanced, there is Mapedit. This software helps you to create imagemaps quicker and easier. I have this program but I'm not quite at that level yet.
- It might also be helpful to have a paint program to help you create and edit gifs for you to use in your imagemap.
Be yourself. Don't try to give other people a false image of who you are, it doesn't benefit anyone.
- To me, when one creates a Home Page he/she is showing the world what type of person they are. Although there aren't many of these around, the strict Type A personalities will fill their pages with mainly pertinent information. They may not be a great deal of fun things in there but all of the information will be useful, informative and important.
- The Type B personalities will put a lot of fun and interesting links in their Home Pages. There will usually be a lot of little icons and pictures scattered on or around their pages. I think that there are a lot more of these types of people.
- Remember, not everyone falls into a specific personality type. Most are some kind of hybrid of the two. Some just lean a little more towards one or the other.
Don't be afraid to experiment. If something doesn't quite work out for you, try to learn more about it and try again.
- It took me awhile to learn how to put in a backgroud, change the link and text colors, and to make a clickable table display. It's safe to say that I had struggled quite a bit eventually I learned. Now if only I could do something about those stupid imagemaps.
5.) The Social Psychological significance of Home Pages, at this point in time, is to create an arena where everyone has an equal opportunity to express themselves. It allows people to show the world how they think and feel.
As you surf the net and look at the different types and styles of Home Pages, you can almost begin to get a feel of what type of personality that person has. Look at the information that he/she gives about themselves, look at the pictures and icons that are around, and look at the links that are present. These are all small clues to the inner psyche of the person who created it.
Home Pages are also a great place to find ways to further your education, relieve stress, improve relationships with others, and find out more about yourself and others.
The future holds many possibilities. Just think, one day we will be able to actually communicate with the person who created the Home Page without using e-mail, snail-mail (letters), or the telephone. We will be able to see and talk to the person online. Maybe even multi-user visual conferencing. Now wouldn't that be something.
These ideas are probably just "small potatoes" to webwizards and developers but hey, I'm not one of them so my ideas are small.
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