Survey...

In today’s lesson i decided to create a survey that we would send out to a variety of different demographic audiences. I believe that by creating a survey I will then be able to provide a service that people would appreciate. The survey would give me an idea of what kind of information, layout, images and interactive services that my target audience would like to and expect to receive from the website. this is what our survey looked like... 

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In today’s lesson I started making my website. First I made a common page which would then be the background of all the pages. I thought this would be a good idea as it increases the professional look of the website.

In today’s lesson I took some photographs using the shot list that I prepared earlier. I also looked through the pictures that I took and selected a few that I believed would suit our website the best. I decided to manipulate these images in photoshop to get rid of any imperfections that I saw, this would then enhance the viewers experience whilst on my site.

After school yesterday  I went to the British heart foundation shop in Catford. I wanted to take pictures of the shop to make out campaign seem more authentic. I took pictures inside and outside of the shop I also took pictures of the donation bags. 

Design of pages...

 

In today’s lesson I started to design the different pages of my website, by designing my website on paper before using iweb to design it allows us to have a blank canvas on which i can let my creativity take place with out the confusion of how to do things on the computer. Whilst designing I decided that it would be best if kept the toolbars and columns the same but just change the content we decided this to give my website a more uniformed look which in turn will make it look more professional. This is one of my pages that I drew as a template:

Main website plan

In today’s lesson I decided to write up a shot list which will contain a list of the pictures that I want to take, the shot list would help me to visualise the images that I want and then go out and take them.

For my main website I have decided to make a campaign site focusing on the issues that arise with heart problems for my website I will be using a variety of audio and visual aids. Images will be a main factor in my site, here is a shot list of some of the pictures I want to take.

I want to take pictures of:

A family, and use Photoshop to fade one member of this family out to make it look as if one member has passed away due to a heart complication and that we as a charity  are  trying to raise awareness about these heart problems ands ways of which they may be prevented.

Someone at the gym or exercising in some way. This will again emphasise the prevention of heart problems. We would also like to have an image of a person eating a healthy balanced diet as this is key to prevention of not just heart problems but a wide variety of other problems as well.

A science lab- where our researchers will be working using the donations and aids provided by the public to try and find new life changing drugs and treatment for heart patients.

Charity shop – to show the wide variety of ways in which people can donate, money, clothes, brick-a-brack, cds, videos and dvds.

Cake sale – the cake sale is just one of the appeals that school children nation wide have done in order to raise money for the ‘Help a Heart foundation’s’ get involved appeal.

I also need to take pictures of people who are suitable to be in various positions in mycharity. For example we need people who look like top end ceo’s and also people who could be working as volunteers for our shops.

I believe that by using a shot list it gives us a chance to plan what exactly I want to do before Ido it. This will intern allow me to visualise what I really want my website to look like and include. So the website is going to be a direct representation of my own thoughts and ideas strung together with the use of planning and clever manipulation of well photographed images using Photoshop.

website conventions

In todays lesson, I started my research which needs to be complete in order to have all the information to create my main site which is based on a heart charity. Because of this we researched into charity websites and compared the techniques and common conventions used to convey information for example the layout, font sizes, photo galleries, and interactive parts.

I print screen and annotated  some charity websites. 

By doing this research it has widened my knowledge on normal website conventions for example; I have learnt that colour plays a huge impact on the audiences first impression and too much colour can be distracting to the information needed to be displayed, however in contrast too little colour can make the website seem dull and uninviting.

In order to have the information easily read a layout is conventionally with a banner across the top to vertical side bars a larger block in the middle also a navigation bar is used to show each page of the website. Websites conventionally use interactivey to keep the audience enaged with the website and the information being displayed. For instance;

-roll overs

-links

-animation

-visual and audio pieces

-blogs

When creating my main charity website we will follow the typical website conventions as listed above

Questionnaire

As research for my school website I created a questionnaire which would  help me understand what the target audience want on the website.

Questionnaire

School Website Research.....

As research for my school website I went on 6 different school websites and analysed them I used 5 secondary schools and 1 primary school. I found that there were more colours on the primary school website where as the secondary school websites tend to have 1 or 2 colours which give them a more uniformed and executive look. All of the school websites followed the same kind of structure whereby the school emblem is in the top left hand side of the page, followed by the school’s name. There are normally two columns on either side where links and other information are placed. Somewhere on the page there is always a head teacher’s column which has a short letter from the head teacher which invites parents and children to the page and explains a bit about the school and its values and aims for the future. In order to make it easier to access information that you require on the websites there is a navigation bar on the navigation bars there are different rollovers such as ‘contact us’ or ‘about us’. Most of the websites have images of students and teachers doing various activities.

For my website i will be following all of the conventions I mentioned above. My  website however will contain a short video clip of an aspect of the school in action. I will edit this video using final cut express, on the apple macs. There will be various rollovers on the page which will take to you different parts of my schools website. all images that i use on my website will be my own images and most will be manipulated on photoshop.

This is an example of my website annalysis, the school is hayes school in hayes, bromley.

 

Web Hosting

Website are distributed via the World Wide Web, companies producing the websites will often pay host companies to store the website on their files, when I researched this I found that this could cost anywhere from free to over £100 a month.

One of the most important factors of distributing your website is the domain name, by choosing a name that contains words which are highly searched on search engines the chances of the website being seen is then increased. But these cannot just be any words they must link together with your website/company.
I can register my domain name with many different companies most of these companies offer very similar service but differ in price. I would like to publish my website using Apache. Apache is a public-domain open source Web server software which is maintained by a group of programmers. Apache started in 1995 and by 2009 it was the first sever to go past the 100 million mark. I chose this server because when I did research I found that it was a very commonly used server and a very high reputation.
I will put my website on Google as it is the leading search engine and by using Google I am almost guaranteed traffic to my site. To make my website even more visible I could use

‘http://google.advertisingwebservice.co.uk/awsmhowitworks.aspx?cid=532&gclid=CKro6p_R1qgCFUdP4QodzhnoAA’ by paying £5 a month I will be able to put my website into the ‘ads’ part on the Google page.

Website analysis

Media Website Analysis.

Brief

As my media as level coursework I have been asked to design and produce a school website using Iweb. The website should consist of 2 pages  with one of these being a linked fully functioning page. For my website i will be using pictures that i have taken and manipulated my self using adobe Photoshop. I will be following the standard conventions of a school website using colours that complement each other and are bright but not too bright. the colors i have chosen to use are light blue and orange i chose these colors as they are not  generally associated with schools which would hopefully mean that people would always remember my website and my school. my school embalm will be in the top left of the page following the normal conventions of a school website. 

18/01/11

During todays lesson i did some web research by looking at school websites and then analyzing them and finding out what things are conventional for school sites such as a color and sidebars ect.