Thursday 7 January 2010
Evaluation Grade 17/20
Excellent understanding of issues
Excellent ability to communicate
Good presentation of work
Excellent ability to to discuss development of ideas, decisions, outcomes and changes
EBI:
More detail on target audience
Use questions in different colour to break up text or upload using slideshare.net
Planning Grade: 16/20
*Very good research and thought behind target audience
*Excellent time management
*Good use of digital technology to present information
EBI:
+Use Demographic and VALS categories for audience profiling
Friday 4 December 2009
Charity websites continued-
Website evaluation
Another convention that websites followed was the fact that their logo was always in the top left of their page, so again due to the fact that all the websites had their logo their I decided to place my logo in the top left of every page of my website. I decided to do this because I figured that if everyone had their logo in the top left then everyone else would know where to find their logo if they wanted to so I figured I don’t want people spending too much time looking for my logo if they wanted to find it so I placed it in the same place.
Also at the bottom of every website is their copyright © and trademark information and again I reckon it is in this position so you know where to look if you want to know this kind of information and also it is out-of-the-way and doesn't spoil the look of the website. Also I have noticed that this information is in a very small font and normally in a colour that doesn't stand out (like a faint grey) and again I think this is so that it doesn't affect the look of the website. So I decided to place my © copyright and ™ Trademark information at the bottom in a faded-out grey as not to draw attention to it.
I also found that most websites have a colour scheme that they stick to throughout their website. These colours are often next to each other on the colour wheel so that they blend together. So I decided to stick to this to keep with the semiotics of the web and chose to use black, red and orange in really vibrant shades to try and appeal to my audience.
I believe that my website represents a youthful and energetic social group who want to get out there and better themselves both physically and mentally whilst having fun and helping others. I aimed my site towards newcomers who are just starting to get interested in the sport. I am trying to discourage competitive people who don’t want to help others and also people who aren’t interested in getting healthier. I tried to do this by having lots of pictures and videos with the names of the moves under them to show newcomers what some of the moves in Parkour are and what their called. I also added lots of advice on how to get started.
I try to get people interested and involved in showing and explaining the best points about Parkour, these are the fact that you can do it with or without friends, it doesn’t cost anything to do as the place you need to do it is all around you all you have to do is look, and also it’s a great way to help you keep active and fit both mentally and physically. So by showing them exciting pictures and videos I hope to spark peoples enthusiasm and make them want to get involved and by doing this they will put a dent in the ever rising obesity levels in this country.
I believe my website would most likely be distributed by companies who are interested in health and fitness and this could even stretch out to the government who are doing all they can at the moment (with their “Live” campaign) It would be harder though for them to distribute my website as unlike on radio or T.V there would be no set slot for an advert to come on and its completely up to the viewer on the internet if they click on my advertisement or not whereas on the T.V or Radio they have no choice for it to be on or not (unless they turn it off) A web hosting service is a type of hosting done via the Internet that allows individuals and organizations to make the websites that they create, accessible to other people around the world via the internet. Web hosts are companies that provide the space on their server to individuals or companies to host their websites. It costs money for someone to host their website and the more the website has in terms of memory the more it costs to host as it take up space on the server of the company hosting the website.
Domain names are an identification label that defines the websites into catagories such as authority, administrative autonomy or control in the internet based on the DNS (Domain Name System) Domain names are used in many different networking contexts which are organized in sub-domains of the DNS rot domain which has no name. The first-level set of domain names are called the top level domains (TLD) including (gTLDs) generic TLDs such as .com/ .net/ .org/ .co.uk and the ccTLD (country code TLD)
My website is aimed towards working and middle-class people who live in an area with internet connection (preferably close to a town or city as that is the best environment for Parkour) I hope to get lots of people involved in Parkour by word of mouth mostly, hopefully the people who are interested and start up Parkour will tell their friends and get them involved and hopefully they will use my site for help on how to learn more and improve their skills. I hope to get more coverage by getting more and more people involved so that the media (e.g T.V, newspapers and radio) take notice and start covering Parkour more and more and then ask where they heard about it from and my site will be mentioned and more people will go there to find out more about Parkour.
I attracted my audience by using a range of exciting videos, pictures, colours and fonts. I found out, through research, that colours, pictures and fonts were very important for attracting an audience. So what I did to attract my audience was using pictures that would excite someone who was interested in an extreme sport. I used bold, bright colours to express the danger involved and the excitement that follows. On every page of my website I have either pictures or videos to show off what Parkour can offer the audience and also I have made it easy, via a navigation bar, to access every other page on the website via any page on the website, this enables flow and fluidity throughout the site which also links strongly with Parkour where flow and fluidity are the foundations of the sport.
I have learned how to use such programs as iWeb and Photoshop to create my website and through this I have learned their limitations and their abilities. One of the limitations of iWeb was the fact that if you created a new website it would delete the old website, now this wasn’t very helpful and the program should allow users to create multiple websites. Another limitation of the program was the fact that it was sometimes difficult to get the page length the same for every page and it would alter itself without asking you and this could get annoying when your trying to get your website to look consistent. But on the positive side it was very easy to create hyperlinks to the pages on the website and also if you copied something that was already linked to another page then when you pasted that item it would also maintain the hyperlink. The limitations of Photoshop was the fact that someone who is new to the software will find it very hard to do anything as all the tools are named oddly and don’t exactly do what they say on the box. But when you get to grips with the software it was stunning to find out the abilities that the software could do and this was very helpful in creating my logo for my website. Another program I used was Blogger, which is a free online blog. This program can be very difficult at times and I found it extremely annoying when I tried to upload my website evaluation as I did it in a Word document but they wouldn’t let me upload a word document so I had to printscreen each page and then put it into paint, save it as an image and then upload it to Blogger via their upload section, now this was a very round-about way of doing things and this annoyed me a lot. But as far as a online Blog it was alright to use (it had some more annoyances such as it was very difficult to get back to your own page (the dashboard) once you were on a blog even if it was your own) but it could do with improving its user-friendly-ness
Looking back on my preliminary task I have found out a lot more of the conventions of websites and also a lot more about how to design one. My school website has horrible, conflicting colours and it was very crammed and looked like everything was battling to get your attention, whereas on my main site I have learned that less is more in a way and tried to keep it looking cleaner and neater whilst still making it look exciting and also easy to use through the use of a navigation bar and a couple of extra pictures and videos places in convenient places. I think the skill that I have developed the most is learning how to use the iWeb software as whilst doing my school website I found it very difficult to do much on iWeb but at the end of completing my campaign website I found that I was much quicker and fluid at doing what I wanted to do on the website rather than being restricted by my knowledge of how to use iWeb.
Video and Photography evaluation
Website design
Questionnaire findings
From my questionnaire I have found out that of the people I quizzed barley anyone had heard of Parkour or Free Running. So my first task is to explain to the people who go on my website what exactly Parkour and Free Running are. Also form my questionnaire results I found out that most the people who were interested in the sport were aged between 16-25 years old and male. So another goal for my website it to get a broader audience and show that Parkour and Free Running can be done by anyone from any background no matter how rich or poor you are or what gender you may be.
I found out that most people were interested in keeping fit and wanted to be healthy but either lived too far away from a gym or couldn’t afford to pay to go to the gym, so again a goal for my website is to show that Parkour can be done anywhere and with no cost to anyone!