Monday 10 May 2010

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



I feel I was more enthusiastic about this task than my preliminary site. I still feel the first site was effective and had a certain good quality, but compared to the new site, our group tried a lot harder and so the product was better. We were more devoted to the new task and showed our new devotion by staying after hours at school to get all the work done, and research it all together to guarantee success.

I learnt how to create borders and why it is important to keep a consistent house border style using colours found either in the picture or in other parts of the site; this create a constant theme throughout.





I also learnt how to spot conventions of other sites and how to apply them to my own, to create an effective yet original site. I also learnt how to work a number of iMac programmes including iWeb. Another thing I learnt was the importance of audience research and questionnaires/surveys.

How did you attract/ address your audience?

We started off by doing primary website research, looking to see the conventions of other websites devoted to animal conservation. This helped us easily establish what we should ensure to include in our site to make it as simple yet effective as possible, and easily reached by the public.
The audience we aimed to target our site at were specifically those between the ages of twenty one and thirty, after primary research. We decided as a group, however, to still try to aim for other ages, and so we decided to design our site aiming at all ages as well as specifying the particular group we were hoping to attract.

The particular language we used on our site is formal yet simple and used in such a way that anyone can understand it. We aimed to appeal to all audiences and so we knew the simple language would appeal to people of all backgrounds and intellectualities.
We stuck to colours we associated with zoos, such as greens and blues. We found out through research that these colours were calming to an audience and so would be very welcoming to any of our potential guests and donors.

We placed our logo in the far left corner of the page and a navigation bar near the top of the screen, which was a consistent theme placed on each page of the site in order for our users to be able to steer themselves easily around the site.

Our font size was a size 12, which is big enough for users to read but not too big to make the page look distasteful. Our headers were set at size 23, in order to clarify the difference between the header and the writing below. It is important for our site users to be able to easily distinguish the difference between the header and the remainder of the text.

We hoped for the public to be able to use our site freely and easily. We were confident with the product we have composed and know it will be appealing to the public. Additional help from our subject teacher helped us to ensure we covered each aspect of what was needed to create an effective site.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We handed out over twenty-five questionnaire surveys to several demographics and worked out who we thought our target audience would be. We were careful to ensure that the questions we used were not biased and clearly stated our aims of looking for the public’s preferences and behaviors.

The surveys helped us clearly establish who we should aim for our target audience to be. We discovered that those between the ages of 21-30 receiving an income up to twenty thousand pounders per year we more likely to donate on a regular basis to animal conservation charities.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

'Cambridge Animal Sanctuary' is the media product I will be evaluating. It is a charity website and its function is to promote my made up zoo and to receive donations from the public in order to keep my zoo in operation.
I looked at the website for the London Zoo for inspiration on how to design my site. Their format was attractive yet simple as the navigation was easy, which is essential to the average internet browser. An example of this would be to use the same site menu bar located somewhere on each page. This bar would contain links to other pages on my site, such as ‘home’ and ‘donate’. An example of the London Zoo page is shown below.













I created a website template which followed trendy styles, often used by many other sites. For example: We placed our logo at the top of the page in the far left corner with the initials of the zoo. We fashioned the logo using ‘Photoshop’, principally the word processing tool.
As I mentioned before, conventionally it is accepted to have a navigation bar near the top of the screen and our site is no different. The bar is repeated on every page to make it consistent and easy to use for any site visitors. Beneath the bar sits a small gap in the page which is used to emphasize the separation between the title bar and the content of the page so as not to confuse any online guests; its indirect job is also to spread out the page in order to keep it looking organized and efficient. We created our own footer, using a selection of photographs related to the zoo. We believe this keeps our page looking innovative, because it is a feature we did notice on any other sites during the research stage. Our footer is shown below.








The content of the website was the creation of my group and me. We generated all of our photographs, icons, and page layouts.