Advanced Multimedia: Spring 2009

Best Practices in a Multimedia Project

These are things to keep in mind when you do a multimedia project:

Define your audience

Storyboard the story

• Segments of the story
• What media will be used in each segment

Think about the appropriate use of different types of media

• video
• audio
• photos
• text
• graphics

Assign team responsibilities

• Team leader
• Lead designer
• Reporters on each segment

Production schedule

• Milestones
• Anticipate technical issues

Search Engine Optimization

Accessibility issues

Layout and design

• Keep it simple
• Dominant image or story on opening page
• Short block of text on opening page summarizing the project
• Hierarchy of content – what’s most important
• Break up content into discrete, logical chunks
• Consistent navigation
• Informative and intuitive headlines and labels

Other elements to include

• Audience engagement and interaction
• Sources
• Outside resources
• Solutions
• Credits or About this Site
• Original source materials

Testing

• Multiple browsers and operating systems – Firefox and Microsoft IE, Mac and Windows
• Usability and quality of content – non-team members

Post-mortem summary/proof of concept

• What you set out to do
• What you did to implement it
• Successes and failures
• How might others do this
• Open source code

For a more detailed version of this, download Jerry Monti’s Best Practices guide:

bestpractices-jerrymonti (rich text format document)