Digital Multimedia, 2nd edition Nigel Chapman & Jenny Chapman Chapter 13(a) This presentation © 2004, MacAvon Media Productions Design Principles

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Technical definition: A collection of Web pages, all of which have URLs beginning with the same domain name General definition: A collection of Web pages with a theme, a coherent structure and a home page Web sites 413

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Totally connected Hierarchical Sequential Hybrid Site Structures 413–418

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Every page has a link to every other page Even for a small site, this structure requires a lot of links and is hard to make sense of May be appropriate for a small site where visitors may want to look at some or all of the pages in any order Provide a standard navigation bar (navbar) on each page, containing links to each of the others Indicate current page ("You are here") Totally Connected 413–415

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Most popular organization for larger sites Home page contains pointers to a subset of other pages in the site Each page directly accessible from home page can be considered the home page of its own sub-site May contain links to home pages of sub- sub-sites, and so on Sub-sites devoted to sub-topics of main site Hierarchical 415

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Essential structure is hierarchical, but there may be additional links (e.g. to each 2nd level page from every page) Use main navbar to access major sub-sites plus: 2nd level of navbar within each sub-site Hierarchical drop-down menus Breadcrumbs popular way of showing current location in hierarchy Hierarchical Navigation 415–416

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 May be appropriate when pages naturally form a linear sequence Sequence of image in an on-line gallery Results pages from a search engine Entries in a Weblog Usual navigation consists of Next and Previous buttons, often augmented with links to every page in (short) sequence Sequential 417–418

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Traditional time-based media esentially linear Digital media, linear order can be altered by scripts and in response to input from the user If script controls playback by computation, but without accepting input (e.g. counts frames), structure is deterministic To accept user input, there must be some controls to accept input May also exhibit parallelism Time-Based Structures 420

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Simple loop: script attached to final frame sends playback head back to first frame Introduction plus loop: script on final frame sends playback head to some earlier frame (not first) Counted loops: Script counts number of times round the loop, does something different after a certain number of loops (e.g. stop) Loops 420–421

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Common case: set of selections on a menu Menu is a single stopped frame with buttons for each menu selection Movie is divided into sections, each of which jumps back to the menu frame at the end Script attached to each button causes a jump to the corresponding section when pressed General branching structures built by allowing users to choose from set of alternatives for next part of movie to play next (e.g. interactive narrative) Branching 422–423

© 2004, MacAvon Media Productions 13 Flash movie clips are self-contained movies within a movie that can play back in parallel Movie clips can be controlled by scripting Stopped, started, sent to a particular frame,… Permits essentially infinite variations on playback of a finite collection of elements Can respond to user input Interactive animation etc Parallelism 423–425