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.