Squiggly Bits, Aesthetics & Interestingness

In MPI104 last week we learnt French! According to Jo the word 'serif' means 'squiggly bits', and 'sans serif' means 'without squiggly bits'. Of course we're talking in means of fonts! For example...

this would be a serif font
whereas this would be a sans serif font

I apologise for the appauling example. i couldnt be bothered changing the fonts and stuff... so i cheated and used italics and bolding. lol.
but hopefully you get what i mean!
According to my year 11 & 12 IT Teacher Mrs McKenzie(just proves that maybe i did pay attention to her raving madness) sans serif fonts are harder to read because they have individual blocks, whereas serif fonts are easier to read because each letter flows to the next.


In regards to aesthetics and websites, I personally like the Bitey Castle . It has a nice opening page, where you click the image to enter. All of the links on the main site are clearly labelled, and down the left column there are animated .gif links, which i think is pretty cool too. There are links to the sites that Adam Phillips, the artist of the bitey animations visits on a regular basis. Considering bandwidth, this site may be a little hard to load, although I am on a slow dial up speed with a crap computer and it still works quite well for me. He's done a smart thing and put each different animation on a different page, so it doesn't take ages to load the page if you're not going to watch the animations. So hes got a big chain of pages that link together (just like a diagram on front page *cringes* i hate that program) which is why i applaud modern technology! lol gone are the days when one must have everything stuck on the one page, and have no exciting colour or pictures- very gross. lol.


Speaking of gross, how about we check out a really badly done website.

For a laugh lets pick on The Worlds Worst Website. And its not a joke, that is the actual title of the website. lol. It just makes me cringe at the basic html that some people use and get away with. This site is good in regards to teaching people lessons! It does actually tell you what is and is not acceptable and what should and should not be done.
This actually brings me to another good site, Lissa Explains its a site that allowed me to steal html codes when i was creating my own websites. This site itself is aesthetically pleasing which is actually quite encouraging to the person who wishes to learn html. "oh this site is nice, it looks like this person knows what they're doing. lets learn from them." well that's kind of how i felt when i was a quivering year 8 student who had never used html before. And it helped too. yay!

Okay, so.... that being said...what makes a good website?
the aim of the website always needs to be taken into consideration, for example, the guys who made The Worlds Worst Website, made it like that on purpose to demonstrate some horrible mistakes people make when building websites, whereas Lissa explains was trying to show off its style to appeal to html and java scripting learners.
blah blah blah websites are so much fun, and they look good and blah.

Writing that is easy to read is always good, for example, if you have bright pink writing on a red background or even a fluro yellow background...it begins to get a bit painful to focus on and one must highlight each word to be able to read it successfully. not good!
Web buttons are pretty nifty and make everything look spiff! That is why i like the Bitey Castle so much, he has made his own web buttons, and has made them animated which heightens the appeal and aesthetics of the site as a whole.

For now, i am over analyzing websites and finding attractive things about pixels. so im going to depart. hope you enjoyed my long and tedious blog.
Thankyou