Blog 3 – Monster Hunter Compendium

The task for this week was to create a webpage that you would like. So, I decided to choose one of the many games that I have been playing and create a website out of it. That being, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate.

For those who don’t know what Monster Hunter is, it’s basically an action RPG where you play as a hunter who hunts monsters to make armour and weapons to hunt even stronger monsters and rinse and repeat.

Target Audience

The target audience for this website would be people who have and interest in Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate (MH3U) or the Monster Hunter franchise in general. Age isn’t really an issue but basically anyone over the age of 16 though a large percentage of players are around their early to mid-20’s.

The reason why it would interest people who play MH3U is because it can act as a compendium for them when they play and need information. As for those who are interested in the franchise in general, it will also give out a fair amount of information to learn.

Site Map

As the website is designed to be a compendium for users, the website has been designed to be fairly easy to navigate, by requiring 3 clicks from the home page to get to any page within the website. To do that the blueprint below shows a rather flat line layout with a fair amount of labels being spread out to help reduce the amount of clicking. The site also needs to complement other sections to easily navigate to other sections. For example, the user is looking at the page of a weapon. From that page, they can click on one of the crafting materials to learn about how to obtain it.

 The blueprint is located below here;

Wire frames

Below I will be showing and explaining briefly about three of the three webpages. That being the Home page, the Weapon Page and the content page. The reason being that most of the label’s landing pages are displayed in the same manner as the weapons page but with different names and pictures. The same goes for the content but this is more or less just the layout as more/different content needs to be put in to display the necessary information.

Home Page

The front page will be fairly simple, having a second search bar just underneath the title label. Underneath this will be a page of the day, displaying a random monster, weapon, item, quest or area from the page and displaying it there.

Weapon Page

To reduce the amount of text and made it easy to navigate, especially on mobiles, each of the weapon types are listed as images or buttons in two column.

Content Page (Item)

On the right column, the page contains the image of said item as well quick information about said item. The left column contains more lengthy information such as the description of the item and how to craft, obtain the item shown on the screen.

Metadata Matrix

Vocabulary	Description	Example	Maintenance
Weapon Type	Various types of weapons	Long Sword, Bow, Switch Axe	Medium
Monster Name	Various name of monsters	Diablos, Nargacuga, Plesioth, Rathalos	High
Monster Type	Various types of monsters	Bird Wyverns, Leviathans, Elder Dragons, Fanged Beasts	Medium
Item Types	Possible types of items	Ores, Potions, insects, bones.	Medium
Armour Skill	Possible types of armour skills	Attack Up, Bombardier, Sharpening, Sleep.	Medium
Areas	A list of locations	Flooded Forest, Mountain Peaks, Deserted Island.	Low

 

Controlled Vocabulary

 

Accepted Term	Variant Term
Monster	Creature, animal, enemy
Hunter	player

TGWTG: Labeling Review and Compare

The site that I choose for the review is That Guy With The Glasses. They are a group of comedian reviewers that cover content from comic books, movies and music.

Label	Destination’s Heading Label	Destination’s <TITLE> Label
Home	The Guy With the Glasses	The Guy With the Glasses
Videos	Videos	Videos
BlisteredThumbs	Benzaie	Benzaie
Podcasts	Podcasts	Podcasts
Community	–	Welcome to That Guy With The Glasses
Site Stuff	Site News	Site News
Store	TheAwesomeStore.com	TheAwesomeStore.com
Blogs	Blogs	Categories – Blogs

 1 ) What Labels you did not like and why, and Suggest Improvements.

My first problem is with the Site Stuff Label. It leads you to their Site News Page which has their policies and a contacts page in the drop down box. It would be better if they called this ‘Terms or Services’ to better inform the user that the page since there is no news posted on this page.

2 ) Whether there was any inconsistencies in the labeling system between the pages (in terms of style, presentation, syntax, granularity, comprehensiveness and audience).

One noticeable inconsistencies is the BlisteredThumbs label as once you go to it, its title is ‘Benzaie’ which is one of the people in the BlisteredThumbs group, and show you his content. This is sort of a problem as well in the Videos section as although it is labelled ‘Videos’ it only gives you a selection of content to go from, making you to have to use the drop down sum-menu to fully navigate through the website.

There is also a small problem at how the Title for Videos, BlisteredThumbs and Podcasts is displayed as they have a large dot point in front of it. This is just my opinion but it makes the webpage a little less clean.

3 ) Examine at least two other similar or competing web sites.  How similar are the labeling systems?  Is any one site clearly the winner (and if so, why)?

For the comparisons, I looked at two of the ThatGuyWithTheGlasses (TGWTG) Partner websites, Team4Star and Cinemassacre. I choose the two as they have similar website layouts. Unlike TGWTG, both the Team4Star and Cinemassacre’s labelling aren’t as confusing as they direct you to the pages that holds the appropriate content that it shows you, though the downside to both of those two is that you have to make use of their drop down menus to navigate through the website. Team4Star oddly enough doesn’t have any Heading Labeling on each of the pages though Cinemassacre does.

What is… an Information Architect?

A Information Architects role in the creation of a webpage is to decide the sorting order of how content within said web site is dealt with. He basically deals with the organizing and labeling, the intranets, the pages within the website, forums as well as any other online features present within the creation of the web site.

The exact roles and tasks of what an Information Architect can vary depending on the type of website they are constructing but some of the roles that fit in the general area of being an Information Architect are:

• Research about the Target Audience and the Business.
• The Analyzing, Organization & Labeling of Data.
• Design site maps, site-flow diagrams to show how the site works .

Organizing Lists… an Alphabetical Order?

This is the list I have be given to sort, in any way I feel like.

• El Paso, Texas
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• The Lord of the Rings
• Newark, New Jersey
• XVIIme siècle
• .38 Special
• St. Louis, Missouri
• New York, New York
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• Albany, New York
• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• The Hague, Netherlands
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Plzen, Czech Republic

And here is the sorted listed that I eventually came out with:

• #1%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• .38 Special
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• 1-2-3 of Magic, The
• Albany, New York
• El Passo, Texax
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Lord of the Rings, The
• New York, New York
• Newark, New Jersey
• Plzen, Czech Republic
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• St. Louis, Missouri
• The Hague, Netherlands
• XVIIme siècle

1. Did you put The Hague under T or H?
   I put this under T since places that start with a T has to start with a T.
2. Did you put El Paso under E or P?
   I listed this under E instead of P for the same reason as what I answered for Question 1 since ‘El’ in English mean ‘The’.
3. Which came first in your list, Newark or New York?
   I listed ‘New York’ first since ‘New’ is smaller in the amount of letters that it has.
4. Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas?
   I listed ‘Saint Nicholas’ first since its second letter has an a even though St. is short for Saint.
5. How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters?
   I sorted them out by arranging them by ASCII number since ‘#’ (35) goes before ‘$’ (36) and ‘$’ (36) goes before ‘.’ (46).
6. Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organist this list?
   I would believe books should have the authors name attached to the end of them in brackets since books can often have the same name.
7. If the cities represent places you’ve visited and the book titles are ones you’ve read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way?
   Give them a date stamp. That way you can order them from the earliest date to the most recent.

Web 3.0 – Internet of the Future

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a great thing, with it being born in 1990. It has grown over the years to what is now, being a huge network of data that users can view, edit and even create their own. The current state of the WWW is in web 2.0 but the ever evolving web is going to eventually reach 3.0 but firstly, let me explain what I think 3.0 is, since there are many different adaptions of the definition.

“When you told me your grand plan for saving Gotham, the only thing that stopped me from calling the men in white coats was when you said that it wasn’t about thrill-seeking.”

Web 3.0 or Sematic Web as it is named is like your personal assistant. It can give you a more precise information about queries asked and it will remember information about you in further queries. For example, with the current Web 2.0. You want to go to a restaurant in your local city, the search engine will just pop out the most popular restaurant from it’s result. With Web 3.0 however, it will find out for you which places you should go to, depending on which other places you liked and what style of foods you like.

Although we are currently in Web 2.0, we are rather close to the new age of the WWW. Within the last few years, mobile internet has became a very common thing, having access to the internet from anywhere you can establish an connection wirelessly.

Also, many sites do tailor selected information to you based on what you have previously seemed/liked though this is still very much in its primitive stages and still has quite a long way to go. An example of this is Youtube. Lets say you watch a lot of videos of League of Legends (LoL)  matches and like them a lot. It will grab that data and give you a recommendation list of more LoL videos for you to watch if you’re interested in, or maybe it will even give you Dota 2 Videos since both LoL and Dota 2 are apart of a similar genre.

In short, we still have a while to go until the new age of Web 3.0 comes into existence but we are much closer to it as it could happen within the next 5 years or less.

Policies of Facebook

Facebook is one of the very popular social media networks with a monthly active user-base of 1.11 Billion (link). I has done many good things for people companies as well as many unsavory things but this segment is just going to go though the Facebook polices and their Term of Services.

The first item that interest me was just how they control the information that you essentially give to Facebook to use. It essentially collects information such as what pages you like, what kind of Facebook apps you use such as games, or even just where you live to create a list of advertisements that you might be interested in. Its good for the companies as it saves them a lot of trouble trying to actively shout out to get potential customers, and users who would be interested in that kind of stuff. But it also, can backfire as it can lead to rather obscure adds and even companies finding their way to Facebook to harm users with ‘fake’ advertisements. (This is from personal experience using the service). Though, they do give the curtsey of removing your name and other identifying information before transferring the data over.

Facebook within their policies has stated that anyone who posts a picture or a video onto their site is given permission for Facebook to essentially give them the all clear to do basically anything they like to the content given to them. Even after deleting the content, Facebook may have backup copies within their server. This essentially shuts out people showing their professional work on lets say their professional page since Facebook essentially owns it as well.

Most of the Terms and Policies seem to be fairly standard for All-ages social network site, though this has brought up the fact that you don’t truly know who has access to what’s information. I personally don’t believe after reading this is that Facebook is ‘evil’. Its more or less an double edged sword as it can both benefit people as well as hinder. My little piece of advice would be to only publish information of Facebook that you don’t care that is goes public.

Hello, World!

Greetings to all those who gazes upon this blog.

My name is Dion Creeney, and this Blog is dedicated to the 3623ICT – Information and Content Management course for this semester.

A little information about myself. I am currently doing a Bachelor of Multimedia at Nathan, Griffith University. I graduate very shortly as this is my final semester of this course. My aspirations from doing this course is to nest myself within the Gaming company as a programmer. The area that I am most interested in is A.I. or Artificial Intelligence as I have a great interest in creating life by producing code. In the meantime, I work as an independent game programmer, focusing on making small flash games in my spare time.

This is my first time that I have ever used a blog and no better way for me to learn then to do it as part of a Uni course. The information from this course would be a great asset to me and will help me in the future when I eventually become employed.

I embrace the learning and would look forward to meld minds with all of you,
Dion Creeney