Assessment 1- Analyse requirements
This week we are in the stages of discussing about the first stages of our website. We will be evaluating what website we are doing. What social media options we are going for and also creating our design sketches.
Summarizing the brief
The project i have chosen to do is the broken lens photography, the website will need to be a simple gallery of her photos in an easy to view layout. She wants most of the focus on her photos and only a brief portion on the homepage for her contact details. She would also like a blog forum of some sort, but she needs a bit more details on how to implements this. The main goal of the project is to make the website friendly and easy to navigate to her photos and her contact details, with 100% focus on her work!
The target audience would be people that love photography or are in need of a photographer themselves, such as people planning a wedding, birthday, graduation, leavers dinner etc. that is the main market we will try and reach on this website. This specific requirement of this website will be the social media integration, which is 100% important for spreading her work around the world with thousands of potential customers. I will be doing a custom build solution as being a simple website i feel a little more concentration on detail will prove to be better in the future of the website. Client side languages i will need is obviously html and css, javascript could be integrated but would be a bit of overkill for what she wants. And there are currently no server side requirements for this project
The above link is to a website that may be a competitor to this website. Very well layed out structure and design, photos are very professional and we aim to over top the competition. What will make our website unique is that it will have its own very special way to talk to our clients and potential customers, with easy to navigate pages and galleries the website will speak to many different levels of photographer, from beginner to advanced.
Evaluating social media
The pros and cons of social media. The pros would include getting active and people finding your website on hundreds of different social media pages. People of people, friends of friends will be able to share what you do and changes to your website, having a big fan base will create a space for you in the community. The cons however might include backlash of dissatisfied customers (if any) from around the country. It might not even be something you did wrong, could simply be a person who’s making trouble just to make trouble, arguing on sites like Facebook for example will not set a good example for your company. So to train people in how to deal with this feedback will be important, so if planning to integrate social media, be prepared to have to deal with the both negative and positive feedback as quickly and best as you can. Examples of websites that do social media well are websites like HTTP://loaf.com/contact-us. They include links to Facebook, twitter, Instagram, pinterest and google+. Easy to navigate interface and well layed out design. A not so good implementation is a sites like Microsoft which haven't even taken the time to do any social media implementation. Wich is a waste because theres so much that could be done implementing sites like Facebook or twitter.
Some goals for reaching successful social media implementation may include Defining what design you want to go with,what color scheme for eg. light colours or dark colours? Minimalist or fill the webpage up. Decisions like this ultimately decide whether the website fails or is a top competitor to other websites of your genre. The social media sites that might be better for my website would be Facebook, as its a very big community with a fair community of photographers and potential customers. Instagram is also a no brainer as it will go together with my website quite well by maybe sharing some snippets of my photos and giving links to the website also to check out the full gallery. And for the blogging side of it i will probably choose the site medium, as its set out a nice professional way, exactly how i want my website to be portrayed.
Below are my design sketches
