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.