All you need for pud...

This is the homepage for my site- 'All.you.need.for.pud.' It is a basic site dedicated to desserts... divided into hot puds, cold puds, cakes and quick puds. I know, it is the most plain-jane idea - but its simple and displays my ability to design a website with some links. 

There is only 5 pages for the site, all with a tiny bit of content- just recipes, if you hadn't already guessed.

I created the navigation buttons (on the right) in Adobe Fireworks, by using an image, resizing and modifying it, then adding the text. 

I did exactly the same for the main images on each page, and also created my 'Welcome message' in Fireworks. 

I aimed the site at women mainly. No particular age group, as its a broad subject and from the initial research there are so many forums and sites dedicated to exactly the same thing, and they don't appear to be aiming in at any specific market.

Probably going to change my idea for the individual website, I want to do something that is simple and that I know alot about...so I was thinking on devoting my precious site to chocolate.
Recipes to do with chocolate, quick and easy recipes. As Easter is coming up, stuff to do with unwanted Easter eggs etc. I thought this simple idea could help me concentrate mainly on the design and doing a few good pages.
The group site - Fucazine-so far is going well. Emily has done all of the design and got it up and running, which is awesome! We all have alot of content to go up, so we can do this over the Easter holidays, and afterwards.

Individual website ideas..

The idea I have for my individual website comes from my housemates photography 'institutions' project. It is called 'Project 19' (number of our house) and she is incorporating the four of us into her work and our house as the institution. So basically, this got me thinking as an idea for a website- to have a website that the four of us can use as a kind of house management system! The site will be called 'project 19' and the homepage will have the four of us as links (left side bar) which are then divided into:

• Profile (basic info on us)


• Portfolio ( we all do different courses so this is a place to upload work onto)


• Chores of the week (who's supposed to be doing what)


• Individual timetables (so no-one forgets what their doing at uni/work/social etc.)


• contact information (numbers/blogs etc.)

The whole point for the website is to use it for us living in the house, obviously not for anyone else- but its just an idea to organise our house a bit!

so far...

So we've decided to use Dreamweaver instead of wordpress to run our group sites. We have all written a substantial amount of features and content to go into site, after the design has been finalised.
We have all written two pieces a week to go into the site , and have organised images to go with the articles. Now we have to focus mainly on the layout, and our own individual sites (which I am still pining over.)

Online meeting!!

Today we had a group discussion about features we are going to work on individually for the site. My next feature for the site is going to be about the mental health issues involving students. I Will be looking at things like depression- why this happens, for example - being away from home, stress, and friendships can all contribute to students feeling depressed. I am going to research why this happens, how it can be helped and if there is any professional help available (either at the university or elsewhere) to help with these issues.
Another small feature I am going to work on is about healthy lifestyles, it coincides with a feature that Katie is writing, about eating healthily, but cheap. I am going to do my homework on what the government guidelines are on healthy eating and drinking, what we should be eating and doing- compared to what students actually do realistically.
Aswell as this, we are going to schedule reviews of nights at the union, so we can start to make up our gallery photographs and to also review good nights out.

Lets get on with it now..

Today, six weeks in to the unit- we are still undecided as to which online platform to use. We have an excellent lay out for our home page set up(thanks Emily!) including links to the gallery, which has the first bits of content, and a link to the forum. (We used http://www.bravenet.com/ for both the gallery and the forum.)

But we cannot, as a group, update add work and run the site at individual times as we have to use Emily's sign-on when we want to do this. Not only is this problematic, but the organisation and placement of the individual files within dreamweaver also causes problems within the group based site.

On the other hand, we could use Wordpress as our platform for the site. The online version gives us a free template to add and run our content. This is problematic on the basis of our site as we wanted a unique and well presented layout, as well as running it as an actual website for our target audience to use. As students ourselves, we know that running our content using wordpress isn't as attractive and we wouldn't get as many hits, compared to if we used our original dreamweaver layout. We could use the 'downloaded' version of Wordpress which gives us more template and layout options - but we need to look into this.

In the meantime, we have all written a good few features and newsy bits for the site, as soon as its launched properly, all we have to do is add them. The plan for the group is to write 2 features a week which are then emailed to our group hotmail address for everyone to read and edit- this is a good way to check grammar and make any changes to the work. It is also a handy way for us to deter who is doing what, so we don't duplicate the same sorts of things.

Steve also reminded us today about our individual sites, which is the second part of the brief.

The individual site doesn't have to be as large as our group sites, the main point of this exercise is to have a strong concept for a website- including

• A strong concept which can be easy and quick to run.


• Clear navigation


• User friendly access


• Not alot of content (a couple of features and news stories)


• Relevant images using photoshop to make sure they are excellent quality.

My initial ideas for the individual site are:

1. An online portfolio for my housemate studying photography- so all her best images would go up, including an interview with her and a feature on a piece, or a few pieces of her work. (which would be my two features.)


2. A music/entertainment site which would stick to one genre. I would include features on the history of that type of music, and a feature on a record label or artist/band (the rise and fall maybe?)

Content management systems

A CMS is a useful system based on 'the immediacy editing model' used in the online industry to run a website more efficiently and realistically, compared to using 'Dreamweaver' to create, update and run a website.

The benefits of using an immediacy editing model are

• Permissions- who can write and edit the site.
• Adding and editing pages easily and individually on one platform.
  
• Content can be produced and updated whilst in use and eventually withdrawn or replaced when it is no longer needed.

Mission Statement

Our idea is to produce an online magazine in the style of Heat magazine (gossipy, trashy, chatty) but instead of using celebrities, we are using students from around the Farnham campus of UCA. We want to keep the main student gossipy theme throughout all the content of the website.

Features:

Stop and shoots -> Fashion

Torso of the week -> Boys

Bum of the week -> Girls

Ask Motha FUCA-> aunt

What’s on -> in the next month

FUCA news -> Gossip, capuse events etc.

Gallery -> pictures

FUCA forum -> Interactive chat

FUCAzine

Over the past week, Team Boob have been working hard to build the infamous FUCAzine website. Focusing on a younger audience (18-24) , we used the skins website as a basis for layout and color ideas.

The images, colors and fonts we chose to use all related to the theme of our website (image above).
The main content involves a forum for our students, a Gallery filled with gloriously vile drunk photos from union nights and 'Torso of the week' (winner). We also have the FUCA news which will have general news from the Farnham Campus.
'Ask Mutha FUCA' will be our online problem page for students. We plan to put posters up around the University to tell students the email address to send their problems to.

Web optimization is actually pretty handy...

Web trends and analysis was demonstrated by Steve using Google analytics, to show us how to view web trends on the net. It is useful to understand how may hits one page on a site had in a month, and how long for, all depending on the different 'keywords' used to search one site.

Web optimization is used by the amount of repetitiveness on one page of a specific keyword, or a number of keywords. This is important when choosing a name for our site, and what content to have on the homepage as we want our site to be as high up as possible when searched on google.
To test this and to explore how many appropriate and useful options we had, 'Google keywords' gives us the opportunity to see how many hits a specific keyword has, relating to our website.

The highest used keywords, relating to our website were:

• Student magazine
• Farnham UCA gallery
• Farnham nightlife
• student union
• students union
• student union pictures
• University students union
• student chat rooms
• student chat
• student discounts
• cheap food
• naked students
• drunk girls

This means that all these keywords link to the theme of our website, and have been searched in Google alot on a monthly average. By using one or more of these on the basis of web optimization, (repetition) it will in theory direct the viewer to our website, therefore increasing our google ranking.

Second Semester...

Group website.

In a group of five of us, known as 'Team Boob' our idea for a group website is to make a online 'Heat' magazine aimed at students from UCA. It will be specifically for students about students. We want it to by quite tacky and funny, gossipy and generally fun to read and also to produce.

Our initial ideas to include in the website are:

• Student profiles
• Reviews of student nights at the union
• Video/audio footage- 'open mic night
• Forum for students discussion and opinion
• 'Torso of the week' 'bum of the week' (heat magazine/nuts type of tacky naked stuff)
• lecturer profiles
• Gossipy stuff
• Fashion articles
• Topical features (Valentines day etc.)
• General features (health, beauty, interviews etc.)
• Problem page

Naming our website 'FUCAZINE' came from playing around with the Universities name (UCA) and embedding it into the theme of our site; it is a catchy title and relates to our audience.