Week 7

This week, I created three maps for the three stories of the web site. I used the map drawing program MapInfo to create the maps and make further changes in Photoshop. As the content management system of the Web site shrinks the photos for the Web site to 400 pixels wide, I couldn’t make the maps any larger than this and needed to make sure that the letters on the map are legible at that size.
Another popular map drawing program is ArcGIS. But this program was much more complicated than MapInfo and took much longer to master. Also, the main advantage of ArcGIS is that it is better for geographical analyses, while all I need is drawing maps.
For the maps, I incorporated different layers in MapInfo, depending on what the story was about: a layer of country shapes, a layer of cities, a layer of rivers, and a layer of administrative regions (i.e. state or provinces).
Here are the three maps I created for a story about the media state of 5 Central Asian countries, a story about Mumbai during the terrorist attack, and the one about how the tainted milk scandal was covered in various provinces in China.



My efforts to embed a Google map on our Web site still hit the dead end, as the IT trainers said that they themselves never tried embedding maps and therefore could not explain why I failed to use the Google map key.
RESEARCH:
I completed my copy of the Global Journalist’s Web site with 3 positions of the same ad. This work took me much more time than I expected, as instead of straight-forward table layout, I had to design a DIV layout which I was previously unfamiliar with, to be able to recreate the same appearance of this Web site.