Ideas stage!

The band I am doing my website on is the Arctic Monkeys.

Now that I had a new website idea I needed to come up with some exciting ideas to make it enjoyable for views and make it stand out from your everyday fan site.

My first idea was to create a news feed which fans of the band could go to look at to get the latest news about concerts and song releases.

Another idea I had was to link the site to ticket master so that fans could go and buy tickets for the concerts. However I later decided against this because I didn't want to distract viewers from my site.

I wanted to create a place where fans of the band could go and listen to the music as well as learn about the band, therefore, a video page was necessary for that to happen. For this i decided to link in videos from Youtube and update the website when new videos from the band were released.

Of course I had to come up with a logo and banner design for the website so that it would be memorable.

Start Over

I decided to change what I wanted to do for my website so that I could make it more personal to me instead of the University. 

My original idea was to create a site on Kingston University Student News, however after looking over my research and proposal I came to conclusion that I would be better of creating a website that I would like to visit. 

Thats when I came up with the idea to create a website on my favourite band! At first I thought that it might be a bit unoriginal however after looking into it further I became more and more fond of the idea. 

Proposal

Introducing my website!

My website name is Kingston University Student News - KUSN.

As I am a student I wanted to create a website that has a Kingston University student target audience. 

The main idea for my website is to provide information to Kingston Uni students about what is going on at uni, around the town, nightlife and upcoming events. The reason why I chose this idea was because I think that students need a place to go to get information that can't necessarily be found on the official Kingston University website. 

General Content

The general content of my website will include a home page that has general information about what is going on around the uni. There will then be different pages for different subjects, for example: page 1 might be on things going on around the town, as Halloween and Christmas are both coming up there will be a page that provides students with upcoming events to attend. Each page will include different images and videos depending the web page topic. I'm hoping to include twitter and Facebook feed widgets in my website to make it more desirable to students. 

Timeline

Week 3 - Be set on an idea for my website and started writing up my proposal for how it will look. I will of uploaded at least 2 blog entries already. Start to get the hang of Dreamweaver and Photoshop. 

Week 4 - by week four i hope to have gotten used to how Dreamweaver works and to of started my website. I should of already created my banner for the website. I hope to of finished my proposal by the end of week four so that I have more time to focus on the design of my website.

Week 5 - My proposal will have been submitted and website should have some strong progress. 

Week 6 - Week 6 is reading week so this gives me a lot of time to do editing and start to create new pages for my website.

Week 7 - I hope to of finished my home(index) page and to of nearly finished page 1. 

Week 8 - Spend week 8 doing research on for my final pages and looking up how to create widgets for twitter and Facebook. 

Week 9 - I should have completed all four of my pages and be in the editing stages of my website. 

Week 10 - Final tweaks to the website so it is ready to be uploaded. 

Week 11 - Week 11 is Christmas so hopefully i should have completed my website by then and just be doing evaluations and if need be last tweaks and edits. 

Flowchart

This is a simple flowchart so show how my page layout will work throughout my website. To start I have my index page which then has 4 pages coming off of it with there own individual links. On page one there are two more pages attached. Page 1a and 1b will also be linked to the index page so that you can track back to it, however you will not be able to go straight to them from the index page you will have to go via page 1. I didn't want ot make my layout of the website to confusing because i find that website that have lots of links are difficult and confusing to use which then puts me off revisiting them.

Wireframe

This is the basic layout i want to have for my websites index page. At the top of the page will be the websites name and header, just bellow that there will be a navigation bar to each different page. I want to have a section on the homepage that tells the reader exactly what is in the website and what it is about. I also want to have a short paragraph about how to use the website so it is simply and easy. I am hoping to have a section where there will be rolling flashes of top news to make the website more creative and ambitious, however this may be tricky as i am unsure on how to do this so it will take a lot of research. Under the new flashes will be the main body of the page.

Research for website ideas

I decided that the best way to chose a website idea was to look at others to see which I liked the most.

The options:

• Charity - A charity form would mean that I could advertise fundraising days and events for either a specific charity or show the different events going on for lots of charities in the local area. An example of a charity website is Oxfam. They let visitors of the website know what they are doing, have a page on how to get involved with the charity, how to donate, they also have widgets to their twitter, Facebook, Instagram and youtube pages. 
• Creative industries - For example a website for a museum, radio station or gallery. I looked at the Natural History Museum to see get ideas of what I could include in my creative industries website. They have pages on how to get to the museum, what's at the museum, gallery of pictures of the museum, facilities and like Oxfam they also have widgets to their twitter, Facebook and Instagram pages. 
• Research Oriented -  For a research oriented website I could choose my own subject and include any essays that I have done at uni, or any projects. For example as I do sociology as well as media and cultural studies I could do a website on one of my other modules that I find interesting. If i went with this idea I would do a website based on Youth and Subculture, explaining and showing different subcultures that are around today and once that have come and gone.  
• Creative - With a creative website I could again include my own subject, for example; I could do a website that is based on what is going on around kingston, including inside and outside the uni. An example of this could be the Kingston Tab page which is for students to visit. 

Index Page (home page)

In the last lecture we started to learn the basics on how to create the home page/index page of our website. We did this using Adobe Dreamweaver again. Firstly we created a new folder to save onto our USB's called siteroot, within this folder we then made two more folders, one for images and the other was a html folder. Once we had done this we then moved back to Dreamweaver to start our index pages. As most of us didn't know where to start we were given a template to follow which we then put our own individual touches to.

This is a screenshot of the start of my index page, created on Dreamweaver with CSS and HTML.
 

Website Ideas

Im starting to try and think of some ideas that I might use for my website. When we were first told that we would be creating websites I was a bit worried as I didn't have a clue what I was going to do mine on, however after two weeks of lectures and practicals i've started to come up with some ideas that I think may be interesting.

I don't want a boring website that I don't even like looking at let alone anyone else so I think I need to do it on something that everyone will find interesting. Personally I think that an informative websites are the most interesting, however I want it to be attractive for students. Therefore I think that a website where Kingston University students can go to to read about whats happening in Kingston and gossip about student nightlife.

Another idea I had was to create a fundraising page for Kingston University students to post and upload charities that they are involved in and links to donate money for their charities to raise awareness for certain charities that other students may not be aware of.

Week 1 - The basics

This year we have been asked to create a website of our own.

In our first practical session we straight away started to learn about the basics of coding for a website. Firstly we looked at how to create an image that is suitable for using on a website, we did this by editing a chosen picture in Photoshop so that is was at the correct size and had the correct amount of pixels. We were then introduced the Dreamweaver, a programme used for creating websites. At first I found it difficult to use as I hadn't used this programme before, but once I was shown around the basics it became quite simple.

Using Dreamweaver we looked at The Guardian online as an example to see what a website looks like before it is uploaded onto the internet. We played around with different codes to change things on the website, for example I changed the heading from The Guardian to Kingston University.