Assignment 1 — Analyse Requirements
Summarising the Brief
Close Shave Barber Shop is a men’s hairdresser looking to get a website, Facebook and Instagram pages up and running. They would require an Instagram page to show off their pictures; and on their website would like an interactive map to help people find the shop’s location.
The main goal for this project is to create a decent and functional website for the shop, and also a Facebook and Instagram page.
The shop’s website could be targeted at men of all ages, who may enjoy “rock-a-billy” music, tattoos and perfectly trimmed beards.
They would like to possibly incorporate some form of a booking system, so that people can book haircuts or appointments online.
Since I haven’t yet worked with a CMS, so that will be the way I plan to create and work on this website. At this point I will be using HTML, CSS to create the basics of the website and some JavaScript for the social media plugins and the booking system. The server will need to be able to display pages, process user input and may need some sort of a database to possibly store customer information and bookings. There are unfortunately little to no competitors in the same type of website as this one. So there is not much for me to look at to gain inspiration from, however this could allow me to be somewhat more creative.
Overall this website will be simplistic, hopefully contain plenty of content and will also look visually appealing. There will be 5 web pages within the site to meet the projects requirements which includes a home page, about/contact page, blog page, picture gallery and a booking page.
Evaluating Social Media Options
When integrating social media into a website there are some positives and some negatives. Positives being things like:
- Good publicity
- Broader audience
- Creates a larger online presence
- Makes it easy for customers to reach out to or message the shop
- Opportunity for customer feedback
- Increased sales
While there are a few negatives such as:
- Easy for people to criticize or complain to the page, which can make bad publicity
- Social media may require constant monitoring
- If there are not many posts or updates then there may be no actual benefits to have the social media page
- Risk of inappropriate and unnecessary behavior on your page
I would think, that for a social media page to stay relevant and useful, that it should have appropriate content, and be updated at least once a week(with a picture or two), perhaps more often if there some kind of special/discount or event happening
For this project both a Facebook page and an Instagram account will be created for the barber shop. Another form of social media that could be used is Twitter. However for a store like this, I don’t believe Twitter would actually be useful in any way, there wouldn’t be enough things to post or hashtag for a Twitter account to be fully utilized.
Design Sketches
For the home page i have set it out with a banner along the top, social media buttons between the banner and the horizontal navigation bar. Below that will display a large image of the store. For the font of the navigation buttons I plan to use Futura, and for general text I will use Arial Rounded MT Bold. The navigation buttons will have a black or white background with the opposite colour text over it. At the moment I will have a flat white background for the website to create a nice black and white type theme, but that may change during the creation of the website. There is also a small footer along the bottom of the webpage for easy navigation.
The about page will contain a paragraph or two at the top talking about the store, what they do..etc On the right of that will be an interactive map of where the store is located. Underneath the information about the store will be a small section where customers can see contact details.
The gallery page will have an Instagram plugin to show all of their pictures from their Instagram page, with some captions.
The booking page will have a form which customers can fill out and submit, if they would like to make appointment to come in and get a haircut or trim.
The blog page will have a plugin to show the shop’s wall of the Facebook page. Where customers can see the latest updates, events, ask questions or make a comment.