Wednesday 5 January 2011

Q7. What Do you think you have learnt in progression from your preliminary task to the full product?

My first site was plain and very conventional, following the rules of school site design. I knew how it should look but I wasn't very creative in the way it was constructed or with the images and the colour scheme. I understood the conventions of a school site from my research but I wasn't creative in how I used them. I would say our designs were safe and boring. I think the final draft of the new site shows how much I have developed creatively and that I'm not afraid to challenge conventions to make a product more appealing to an audience. A school is very corporate in a lot of ways but it doesn't have to be. If I was going to do the school site again I would make it bright and exciting for young people and not focus so much on the parents. I think I would aim it at the students and then have a section for parents to get information that was a bit more formal.

I've also learnt how to use blogger more effectively as time went on. I think I was a bit afraid of it at the start and I've been a bit lazy about getting posts up on time for the first draft. Once I realised what I could do and saw what other people were doing I started to get my work scanned and uploaded and get my blog organised. I think there's still a lot of work I've done that I haven't uploaded but when I do my A2 blog I'll keep it organised like a portfolio to show my ideas more clearly.

Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The things i have learnt from constructing my product have been a useful in the process and will help me to make re-corrections to my website in the future.
I have learnt how to use iWeb on an Apple Mac which I used to make my website, this is useful to me as I can easily change parts of my website if my partner and I don't like it for instance the layout of it, pictures changing information due to changing events moving pictures around or even getting rid of unimportant things. For our first draft we got quite a few things wrong but we found it much easier to make the changes than we did building the site because our skills in PhotoShop and iWeb had developed so much in a short time.
I have learnt to use PhotoShop to edit and crop pictures into the website which is extremely useful as when adding new pictures to the website it will not be as time consuming as the first time I tried using it. Also i was able to edit the titles of my pages to a style and colour i wanted it which i believe makes my website more aesthetically pleasing.

I leaerned how well the different creative programmes worked together too so it was fairly straightforward to make a slidshow in iPhoto, drag it into iWeb and then add sound. It was also simple to move images from PhotoShop to iWeb and make adjustments so I was surprised that everything worked so well together.

Q5.How did you attract/address your audience?

The way my website attracts my target audience is by using simple colours which are easy on the eye such as green, yellow and light brown. These colours also have simple connotations of nature and happiness. The colours have been chosen also like this to link in with the pictures of the horses which is also another way my website attracts my target audience as the pictures are of horses which a relatively cute. The language used is very easy to read as the target audience is mainly for young girls so we have not put in many big or hard to understand words. This is good as it is also very easy to understand by any type of reader of any age.

The positioning of the pictures and writing have been set out in a conventional style as we did not want to have the reader looking in different places for different information, the links to other pages and websites and labelled clearly so it makes the website more efficient and easier to use. The navigation buttons are fun with a western theme and there are easy to spot and click on for young site visitors.

Other things that i think could attract more people to view my website is different fonts for the titles of pages and for the actual written information. The website also has a picture slide show on its front page which is a conventional look to a charity website as some of them have sliding pictures of what they're charity is about.

I expect the people who visit my website to be happy with the content and information given about the horses and how they can help. It would also please me if the viewers liked the layout and pictures on the website as it was very time consuming and my partner and i think it is aesthetically pleasing.