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Jelilat Adesiyan

ENG 6328

Hypermedia Theory & Design

EBSCOhost: Search Engine Tips & Tricks - Hypermedia Project Rationale

The genre I’m using to document my resource, the EBSCOhost search engine, is the blog

genre. I had initially wanted to create a tutorial, but based on advice from my peer reviewers I

decided to create a blog instead. I felt a blog would give me ample opportunity to document the

source by topics, and enable the readers to view each idea more clearly. My tutorial would have

been in one long document or video, so I’m happy I chose a blog. My vision for my final draft is

to have a blog that discusses different topics, and furthermore have a space where others can

comment and request more tips for using the search engine. I will be posting about twice a week

as recommended by Gentle (2012, p. 71).

I chose WordPress as the hosting site for my blog because I currently have three blogs on

their site, it is easy to use, and I have never been disappointed with it. It also checks out in terms

of spam control, archiving, content import and export, times publishing, authoring and editing,

storage needs (it gives 3GB of space for media), templates, and themes and styling capabilities

(Gentle, 2012, p. 70). It allows me to control spam messages, archive posts, upload media or

link it by URL into a post, schedule posts, and choose and modify themes. As expected by

current convention, all posts are also shareable to other network and platforms. Furthermore, I

was also able to trackback (see Gentle, 2012, p. 70) to previous posts. For example, in my

‘Welcome’ post, I was able to insert a link to my ‘About’ page, and WordPress used the

Trackback function to notify me about it. The WordPress system automatically posted a

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comment under my ‘About’ page titling it as “One thought about ‘Welcome’” with a link

redirecting the reader to the ‘Welcome’ page.

In choosing my voice, I decided to use a personal direct voice. As Gentle (2012) advises,

“You want to give a personal feeling to your message and identify who you are and what your

role is” (p. 85). I tried to show my role as that of a guide by referring to the reader as “you,” and

also tried to make the blog personal so as to give a face-to-face appeal without being there. In

addition, I used references in some of my posts to support my claims because I was appealing to

educated people, specifically to people who use the EBSCOhost search engine or are planning to

use it. For instance, in my ‘The EBSCOhost Help page” post, I used a peer review source to

justify why using small fonts might deter an audience from finding high quality information. My

audience will typically be accustomed to using reasoning as well as evidence when making

claims, so I tried to appeal to them with scholarly sources.

I tried to create appropriate titles and pages for my blog. I added an ‘About’ page to my

blog because as Gentle (2012) notes, “Readers are interested in the person behind the writing,

[…] why you started writing, and how you came to know the information you know” (p. 152).

The ‘About’ page which includes my picture should establish my ethos and will hopefully give

readers information about me that will garner their trust. I also tried to use appropriate post titles,

for instance in using “Choosing Databases” as a topic to one of my posts, I was able to let my

readers know in advance that the post was about choosing databases. I didn’t stick with Gerunds

for all my post titles, because each post title was chosen based on their proximity to EBSCOhost

terms as they were used on the ‘Help’ page of the site. I also categorized each post using “with

images” and “with videos” so that readers will know what kind of multimedia the post has, if

any. I also chose my tags with careful considerations. For instance in my ‘Welcome’ post, I

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tagged the post with ‘EBSCOhost, EBSCOhost Tips & Tricks, and Welcome. I chose these tags

so that if readers were to search for anything about EBSCOhost within WordPress or outside of

it, they might come upon my page, or might discover it through the ‘Discover’ function on

WordPress.

My blog is minimally designed. I tried to make it aesthetically stark by using limited

graphics (such as background images) except where needed. I added a tagline to my page to give

further information about the blog. Krug (2014) argues that “Tagline are a very efficient way to

get your message across because they’re the one place on the page where users most expect to

find a concise statement of the site’s purpose” (p. 95). Based on advice from my professor and

peers, I chose the tagline “Search Engine Tips & Tricks” because I felt it was a concise phrase

about my purpose for the blog. Initially, the blog was supposed to be titled, “EBSCOhost Search

Engine Tips & Tricks”, but after typing it in and previewing its placement, it was all wrong. As

seen in the pic below (see fig. 1), the font for the title is very large. The font isn’t one of the

things I can modify because I am not a premium member. Using the title as a whole presented a

very ugly image. The theme I chose uses a huge font for page titles. If I had used the title

EBSCOhost Search Engine”, the theme would have extended the title into two lines of all caps.

Figure 1: Home page with "EBSCOhost Search Engine" as a title

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This is very disruptive as a title because as Kostelnick & Roberts (2011) write, “[…] uppercase

version tends to run together because they’re all the same height. Uppercase text isn’t much of a

problem for a words or two, but designing text in continuous uppercase can annoy your readers

because they have to work harder to process the message” (p. 134). Although my title contains

only three words, I took Kostelnick & Roberts’ (2011) advice to heart after seeing an image of

what the page would look like with a title like that (See fig. 1). It looks good up there because I

have made the image smaller and the full effect isn’t quite evident, but if the image was seen in a

bigger screen, perhaps a desktop screen, the font becomes more difficult to read. Seeing it in

close proximity with my laptop cinched the decision of whether to stick to “EBSCOhost” or

“EBSCOHost search engine” for me, especially because I know from personal observations that

people will use laptops to view the page as well. As a result, I decided make use of the tagline

option by changing the title to “EBSCOhost” and adding the tagline “Search Engine Tips &

Tricks”.

My blog theme is “The Chunk Theme” (See fig. 2).

Figure 2: Blog page with the Chunk Theme in use

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I chose to use this theme out of hundreds of themes for many reasons. It has a clean fresh

look. The theme colors are white, black, gray and green. This color scheme should be accessible

for people with vision problems because there is “significant contrast between the text and

background” (Krug, 2014, p. 181). To enhance the blog’s accessibility I added a caption,

alternate text, as well as a description to every image I used. The captions I used differed slightly

from alternate texts incorporated, I added a little bit more detail to alternate texts. I felt both

types of text labels were needed due to accessibility validations. The blog has three pages, the

‘About’ , ‘Recent Posts” and the ‘Home’ page. They are located at the top due to the theme

design, but that is also one of the reasons I chose this particular theme. Notice that there is a lot

of white space. As Kostelnick & Roberts (2011) observe, “Dense text fields often obscure the

structure of ideas because everything blends together” (p. 180). White space draws emphasis to

the content, and diminishes the effect of texts in large blocks. Each post is present on the home

page, arranged by the most recent date, as convention dictates, and it is also separated by a thin

black line and lots of space. Each post title is a link that carries the user to the post page where

only the post resides, and no others. This presentation diminished the effect of the lengthiness

and should help the user focus on one topic at a time. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the

theme, I was only able to add the search bar as a widget, but I believe the related article section

right underneath each post (on the post page) should make up for that failing to some extent.

There is also a “follow” link available after each post (for all users) and on the navigation link of

each page (for WordPress users only).

I added a ‘Recent Posts’ page due to a crippling limitation of ‘The Chunk Theme’. The

theme doesn’t allow for side widgets (side bars), only footers. I would have chosen another

theme, but I didn’t find a free theme that had a simple, yet aesthetic design like this one. The

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themes I found were either too simple, or had an already set audience (theme-wise) that didn’t

match my intended look.

I used static images (created by me) as well as a linked video to corroborate my blog

discussion. In my “An Advanced Search” post, I provided a link for a video screencast tutorial

on how to carry out an advanced search. Since the video is an exact representation of the task

with a voiceover, I felt it would do a better job of explaining the task than screenshots might

have. I embedded a YouTube video, but I also provided a link to the video that opens a clearer

version of it. The video I linked to rather than embedded is the same video, but it is clearer than

the YouTube version, moreover, it already comes in a bigger screen. Whereas, when a YouTube

video is maximized, it is pixelated. I couldn’t embed the video because it isn’t supported for

WordPress embedding as per the whitelist (list of acceptable URLs for embedding) of their

oEmbed process, and since it could not be downloaded I posted a link instead. I had to be careful

using other people’s videos because of the fair use component. In order to embed someone else’s

video (Any video not present on WordPress’ internal whitelist), I would have had to download a

video from another source, trim the video, and then embed it. As Stanford’s fair use page (2013)

explains, sometimes citing is not enough in litigation, it states,

“Some people mistakenly believe it’s permissible to use a work (or portion of it)

if an acknowledgment is provided. For example, they believe it’s okay to use a

photograph in a magazine as long as the name of the photographer is included.

This is not true. Acknowledgment of the source material (such as citing the

photographer) may be a consideration in a fair use determination, but it will not

protect against a claim of infringement. In some cases, such as advertisements,

acknowledgments can backfire and create additional legal claims, such as a

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violation of the right of publicity. When in doubt as to the right to use or

acknowledge a source, the most prudent course may be to seek the permission of

the copyright owner” (Measuring Fair Use: The Four Factors, 2013,n.p).

In cases where I didn’t find the appropriate videos, I used screen captured images instead.

As Gentle (2012) writes, “Photos are often the best solution for showing sequential instructions

rather than writing them out or using complicated 3D modeling software” (p. 88). I decided

images would be best in those cases because it would enable me to show the situation exactly as

it exists. Using images was particularly useful in my ‘The EBSCOhost Help page’ and my ‘Page

Options’ posts. I was able to use images to justify my creation of the blog in a clear and succinct

manner. The images also helped me break up the otherwise long body of text.

Overall, I tried to create a blog that was usable and accessible.

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References

Gentle, A. (2012). Conversation and community the social web for documentation (2nd ed.).

Laguna Hills, Ca.: Xml Press.

Kostelnick, C., & Roberts, D. (2011). Rhetorical Background. In Designing visual language:

Strategies for professional communicators (2nd ed., pp. 3-45). Boston: Longman.

Krug, S. (2014). Don't make me think revisited: A common sense approach to Web and Mobile

Usability (3rd ed.). Berkeley, Calif: New Riders Pub.

Measuring Fair Use: The Four Factors. (2013, April 4). Retrieved April 17, 2015, from

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/#sthash.7moB0Zkj.dpuf