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?)