New Media and Web Production

Teazia Vincent
COM 430Z
The article that I read for today’s class is titled "New Media and Web Production" by Jason Whitaker. This article describes new media as “a catch-all term applied to the various components that constitute digital production, whether for the Web or other formats such as digital video" (57). This article sheds light on web production and how hypertext, audio and video, digital imagery and html are important components to this “new media.” Each one of these things mentioned has an important role in the development of the web. While reading this article, Whitaker describes to the reader how the importance of image has heightened since the invention of the computer and how issues of image manipulation can be a problem (62).

Image and text are two important components to the web. There are many different formats that are used, but the two most important are Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) (82). Although they are both image formats, they can be used differently. Text is obviously important because it allows people to communicate, but users are also able to communicate using images (82).

Reading this article introduced me to a lot of different elements of web production. One that interested me most was the layout of the webpage. According to Whitaker, “a web page can be extremely long or wide; in practice, users get bored after too much scrolling and it is generally better to include links to multiple pages" (84). It can be annoying having to scroll down a page for such a long time or having to scroll it from side to side. Whitaker notes that those are common problems if the layout i s bad. Web pages are easier for me when the information is in large print and easy to find. I think the creators of some web pages do not think of the audience. They do not create the page to fit into the browser and that can affect the amount of users visiting the page (84).