Monday 10 May 2010

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it full product?

There is a lot of difference between the preliminary product to the full product, just in the amount of detail and care that has been taken to perfect the site.

From the technology part of the learning process i have learned how to edit videos using Final Cut Express which includes adding audio and text, how to make logos and buttons using Photoshop, how to use HTML to my advantage to better my site etc.

To help further my understanding about conventions of sites and why we use them them and how we use them to attract a certain type of audience. I also learned how the use of colors, text, language of text and pictures can be used to attract certain types of people. For example i made sure that the language that we used when writing the text was simple but gets to the point without being too complicated. Doing this ensures that the range of audience we can get through too is greater than what it would be if we used complicated words and terms that some people would not be able to understand. Another example would be the pictures we used. As you can tell on the site we used the most natural but beautiful pictures we could take in the local area. This helps people understand how beautiful our planet really is and why we have to save it.

All these techniques are essential to making sure that the final product has not only improved with the different and varying technologies we have used, but also shows we have a greater understanding behind what actually makes a charity site successful, and how certain conventions can be used to our advantage.

Thursday 25 February 2010

6. What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Our original task was to create two pages for a school website. There was only two pages that needed to be made so much thought wasn't needed as one was to be a homepage and another a media page. The pictures were simple to get as we were already in a school so all the picture locations were close by. We got ideas for our website by researching other sites for schools as shown by pictures below:

In total we researched 6 school sites to help us get a grip on what conventions they used and how they used them. We ended up trying to use the conventions of The Charles Darwin Homepage with a black and white theme. This ended up being quite hard as you can only confidently using those two colours with out it being too in you face.

The main aspect of the of Darwin's site we used was the header and menu bar in the header.

In a way we done the same research process for our charity site. We also researched 6 charity sites, below is a few of the sites we researched:

As the WWF site is the most similar to our charity we decided to use the conventions and style of it, as it provides a very clean and crisp look.

As a lot more research and time was spent planning this site a lot of the ideas we had got a lot more complicated to actually do. For example we needed to create a logo to use on every page of our site and for our intro page. Below is a screenshot of the process we had to go through to make our into logo on Adobe Photoshop.


This is how we used the logo on our actual site, we hyperlinked both parts to take
consumers into our homepage.
Our second task was having to create a video to do with the topic of the environment. The first problem we had was coming up with the initial idea. The idea was to film clouds over over night but set the camera to take a frame every 30 seconds so when finished and played over would give the impression that the clouds are moving faster than they actually are. As we didn't what the trouble of having to record a voiceover we decided to add text into the film using Final Cut Express. As another part of the video we have to use audio, for this we used an audio track that was suitable for the video.

This is a screenshot of how i added the text and mp3 to my footage that i recorded.

Another part that of the website that was hard to grasp was applying html. To make the site more realistic i decided to add an official donate button that linked up with Pay-Pal.

This is a small part of what it looked like when making it on iWeb.

This is a shot of what it looks like when the site is published and when clicked on donate.

Monday 11 January 2010

5. How did you attract/ address your audience?

Again knowing that i had to keep the site conventional to help appeal to all kinds of people i had to stick to simple ideas that would creat maximum effect. The colour is kept simple through except for when adding in the donate button as this was supposed to stick out to the audience so they are sure where they are able to donate and this button will appear on every page of the site to enable easy acces to the page. The key to making sure you address a wide range of people is to keep it smart and a simple this way everyone can understand it.


The font size was enlarged for logos to make it clear for the audience to read what it said and to get it to stick in their head. For the Titles pages the text was slightly enlarged to let the audience know that these are the places that you can navigate to and also highlighted the box around them to let the audience know where they are on the site, it was highlighted with a contrasting colour to the the background to help improve the visibility of the title.


I positioned most of they heavier text on the left hand side because it is human nature to read from left to right so it only makes sense to have it this way, this also means it is a conventional way of having text on the left and pictures an links on the right as it is with most sites like mine.


With the rollovers on our site we did not go to mad on how the rollovers looked. Simply all we did was made sure the audiences knew that it was a link to a different page. We did this by simply changing the colour of the text as the pointer passes over it.


Step by step to making a hyperlink on my site.