OUGD504 - A Brief History Of... Website - Evaluation

General Comments

This project came on the back of my summer project, which was always going to make it difficult for me, because my summer project wasn’t something I did very seriously. I prioritised having fun with it rather than giving any real thought to what it might lead to, and consequently the content I’d produced wasn’t really the same nature of the sort of content that I needed to produce retrospectively. By this I’m particularly referring to the quality of the photographs and the lack of text based research to accompany them.

Successes

Looking back at the project I’m confident and pleased with the fact that I went down the right route with this project in terms of creating a resource, rather than doing something historical or informative. This was due to the nature of the content I’d got from my summer project, and it meant that I didn’t have to devote masses of time to generating more content, which gave me more time to concentrate on work on the site itself.

I’m also very pleased with the final layout and branding of the site. I did quite a lot of development into the layout and grid, and I think it shows, as it does immediately look like a resource that people can add to, which is what the idea was in the first place.

Changes

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to code the website due to being unable to have any more sessions learning to code beyond the introductory session. After attempting to start coding the site myself with a half-basic understanding of HTML, this is something that I feel would’ve presented more problems to me, and would’ve contributed to the project bring much more time-consuming, especially in terms of getting the banner to float over the website.

Like I mentioned earlier, in hindsight I should’ve taken the summer project more seriously in my documentation of it, which would’ve resulted in a more complete website in terms of text, as well as having much nicer and more appropriate. I feel this is something that I appreciate now after the Numiko talk, and their declaration that “content is king”. But other than this there’s nothing else I’d have considered doing differently apart from giving more thought to the colours I was going to use, as I’m still not sure if I’m happy with the caramel colour I used.

Going Forward

This is the first time I’ve ever had a go at creating a website, and I think the experience of having a go at it, as well as the Numiko talk, has given me a much better understanding of the process, as well as now being a bit more knowledgeable on things like SEO. I’m now much more confident that I could be a more web-based designer in the future, and the idea that “content is king” is definitely something that appeals to me.

OUGD504 - A Brief History Of... Website - Scrolling Mechanism and Website Variations

Given that I wasn't able to code the website, and until this point have only been able to verbally explain the way the website will work when the user scrolls through it, I made a small animation to show how it would work.

The mechanism would work the same across all the blogs, below shows how the recipe blog would look with the scrolling mechanism implemented.

When the website is on a 1048x768 screen, this is how it will look.

This is how it will look on a 1366x768 screen.

If the window size was reduced, the content of the page would shrink to the width of the page, and work as two sub-pages which you could toggle between at the bottom of the page by clicking in the circles. The column in which the text is remains thinner than the column the images are in, as this keeps the golden ratio concept running.

   

   

The mobile variation is similar to the reduced screen width variation, except the images for suggested posts are removed, as including less images and links will use less data. For reasons of data reduction, the mobile site will only function as a blog, you will not be able to submit through the mobile site. The background colour is the same across both, as this keeps the mobile site visually consistent. I deemed this to be more important than conceptually consist given how the mobile site is meant to be practical.

   

   

OUGD504 - A Brief History Of... Website - More Photo Preparation

Using the 16 photo's I edited the other day, I decided to prepare the images for their use when they'll be used as links to other similar posts, as well as the 6 images that I used across the top of the homepage. This involved cropping and rotating the original images to the appropriate sizes.

This is the result.

 

 

 

 

 

OUGD504 - A Brief History Of... Website - Photo Preparation

Having known what size my photo's need to be from my mock ups, I took the original photo's from my summer project and edited them to be lighter with a bit more contrast, as well as cropping them down to have the proportions that they will need to be when on the site. 

As I identified in the UXD Session, the websites main use will be to give people ideas for desserts at dinner parties and stuff like that, so I narrowed down the content to 16 images rather than all 32, as this allowed me to exclude the ones that weren't really appropriate for dessert, were't particularly inventive, or weren't particularly nice. 

These are my photo's.

Argentina - Caramel Ice Cream

Belgium - Chocolate Sauce

Bosnia - Nutella and Coconut

Chile - Chilli and Tomato

Columbia - Coconut, Sugar and Cinnamon

Costa Rica - Golden Syrup and Orange Zest

Ecuador - Blackberries and Cream

Ghana - Pineapple

Honduras - Blueberries, Raspberries and Sugar

Iran - Pear, Honey and Cinnamon

Ivory Coast - Melon and Lime Juice

Mexico - Mango and Avacado

Nigeria - Grapefruit

Portugal - Grapes, Pepper and Cinnamon

Uruguay - Peach and Crushed Meringue

USA - Bacon with Maple Syrup