Making my website Day 2

Link to Time-Lapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTED1coB9po

So far I am continuing to make my website from what I have done yesterday and I feel like I am getting to grips with the software now. Today, I focused on some of the more text heavy and widget heavy pages. 

The pages were quite short but were vital to the site and I am glad that I did those pages first. One of the pages that I did was the 'about us' page - probably one of the most important and major pages on any site. It allows the user to find out what the site is about and for my site specifically, it tells the user how things work. On the 'about' page, I talked about the site itself and also talked a lot about how the forum works. I believe that the audience that I am focusing on for my site might not have used a forum before so I decided to break it down for them. I also talk about the advantages of taking part in a forum and a few of the plans for the site in the future. The project is all about me showing my idea and the plans that I have for it. I think placing a few of my goals for the site for the future on the 'about us' page is a great place to put this. 

I also did the contact us page as I thought that my website might need it because of how social it could be. This is a place where people can contact me about disturbances going on in the forum, grammatical errors on product pages, problems with video animation and errors around the site. I think users will really appreciate that this is on the website. They might have a few problems and knowing that they will get their voice heard and will be able to get a response in a quick amount of time, will greatly increase their happiness when using the site. I also added a few social media links that they can use to contact us as well. This will not only be on the 'about us' page but will be on the footer so that people are constantly reminded that we have social media that they can follow to keep up to date with the site. 

Overall, I think that today was a very productive day. I found some more pages that I could include on my site that before starting the productive work I had no idea I needed. I am also very happy with these two pages - I am happy with the content I included on both of them and I am happy with how the pages look.

Tomorrow I have plans to make the more content heavy pages, these might be hard jobs, however I have a lot of ideas to make the pages a lot more interesting and engaging. Hopefully tomorrow I can also figure out how to fix my main page, I am still having a bit of trouble with it but I might look at some video tutorials to see how to resolve the problems, I might also learn some new skills while doing so.

The second day of shooting the instructional video

Final YouTube Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEEolv6djlo

So, today was not a good day for shooting, my friend had told me that he did not want to continue helping me with the video so I was really stuck with how I could finish it in as quick a time as possible. Luckily, my Mum was about to help me in my time of need but she however, really did not want to be in the video and that was fine. Due to this, there was only one other job she could do...filming! I had doubts that her camera skills were even as good as mine, and mine were not the best! I had to make sure before every shot, that things were focused properly and that the lighting was good, however I believe that some shots were not the best. 

Obviously, with my friend being the star yesterday and me having to take his place, the continuity of the video was not good. I am sad that he would not budge from his motion and it was too late to take part what we had already built. This was a big problem that we ran in to throughout the process of making the piece of furniture but thankfully, we managed to recover in a lot of stages.

Things today were a lot more straightforward when it came to shooting. We got the exact shots we wanted, we took a step back at times and thought about better approaches to make the video simpler for people to understand.  Furthermore, we had the right tools for the job and this allowed everything to run as smoothly as possible.  Despite today being much more positive and successful, we did run into some problems and get a bit stuck when building the product, once again showing that it is not so easy to build your own furniture.

We did manage to wrap everything up today and I am very proud of that.  I am a day behind but still doing great and this is why I set up a few days extra, just in case things did not go to plan.  Foreseeing and planning for potential problems/setbacks is so important to ensure that things like this don't suddenly have a domino effect and end in disaster. I am really happy with the footage we got and I am sure that tomorrow I will have fun editing it all together. Overall, the whole shooting phase was not what I had planned it to be from the very start but I believe that in some places it is better than I had envisaged. 

The first day of shooting the instructional video

So today was the first real day where I began making my product. Like I have stated before, I really want to get all of the content for the site out of the way first so that when I start to create my site, everything just falls into place. It also means that I have enough time to plan and get more content in the future if needed. Camera work is not my area of expertise as I have mentioned in the past, so I really wanted to take some time before we actually started shooting the video, to make sure that I knew how to operate the camera well. I got to grips with how the camera worked relatively quickly and I also got a chance to move around lighting to make sure that the area that I wanted to be shown and the objects that I wanted to be focused on, were well lit up. I believe that I did not get it perfect and I did run into a bit of trouble setting up one of the cameras, resulting in one looking a bit more dull than the other.

I had already purchased the piece of furniture that I was going to construct. I decided to get a piece of furniture that looked relatively hard but at the same time a product that looked quite popular, that a lot of people may or will own in the future. I believe I was successful at this, there were a lot of parts and a vast amount of steps to building the furniture. So, today we began building the product once we had our test with the camera and set everything up to what we thought was a professional standard. 

My friend, who was the star of the video, ended up leaving early which impacted my initial plan to get this all done by the end of the day.  Due to this, things did not work out well and we will have to bring the next shoot to tomorrow. When building the product, we really struggled, we ran into many problems and actually got stuck for the good part of half an hour - it really shows that even people from our age range struggle at this sort of thing. We also did not have the correct tools for the job.  We believed, along with everyone else who I had asked, that we did not actually need any of our own tools to make the furniture and that everything we needed, would be in the box.  However, we were all wrong!  We actually needed a screw driver for quite a lot of parts plus, I believe that if I had a video to follow, I would not have made the mistakes that we made today.

I got some great shots today and I am really happy with how it turned out. Hopefully tomorrow we can finish the shoot and not run into anywhere near the amount of problems that we ran in to today.

Holiday Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet

With there being less than a month left for the deadline, I believe that I will have to come in over the half term to make sure that everything is completed. To make sure that I know what I am doing and I know what my aims are every day, I decided to make a better timetable that describes in detail, what I have to do for my production work. Like I said in the past assignments, it is very important that I complete the content for the website first and this includes getting photos for around the site, shooting a video and making small animations. I have to make sure that these are done right and look great. This may take a bit more time to accomplish but I believe that this is needed.

After I have completed making the content for my site, I will begin making the website. I have not had much experience with Muse before, however I have been looking at videos on Youtube to show me the basics of the software and it has given me great confidence. I may have to do a few web searches throughout the production if I run into problems but now that I know the basics, I feel like I know enough. Pages that include more content will be focused on first. This is because I really want to make sure that those pages look good and interesting and they may also give me better ideas for the text based pages. These pages will also take more time so I want to make sure that those pages are done first, ensuring that afterwards, I only have smaller pages to complete, requiring less time.

Problems that I may run into!

I think one of the biggest problems for me is going to be quickly adapting to 'Muse' having never used it before. I will have to be very quick at learning everything I have to know. Luckily, I looked at the very descriptive video and I will also have Steve, one of my lecturers, that should be able to guide me in places that I might be struggling in.

Another problem I might run into is due dates as anything could go wrong during production. Obviously, my goal is to make sure nothing like that happens but lets say I get finished taking all of my photos and I realise that it might not be very well focused, or the video that I shot had a bad angle, then this could really effect the outcome of my website and the content within it. When recording my video and taking the photos, I will make sure that I set myself a shot list, have down numerous photo angles that I may want and make sure on the day that everything looks fine and professional. 

I could also run into a problem where my computer turns off and I lose some work due to this -  I will make sure that I save my work regularly but I will also set myself a detailed timetable that allows me to have some time after I should have created my product, to tweak things or catch up on lost time. The forum might not work as intended due to the software that I am using. I am not sure, but if I do encounter this problem, I will have to make a way around it and maybe make a few extra pages to show the audience what I would have wanted to happen. This goes for anything that might not become producible for my website.

Animation is a big one.  It is probably the area that I believe will take the most time, due to me not having really any previous knowledge on animation and the high standards that it has to be to not look odd or out of place. I will most likely give myself a lot of time to create my animation and I will have to make sure that I use the people around me to guide me at parts that I may struggle with.

How useful was my research?

I found my research to be very useful, it gave me great insight into the sort of audience I am aiming for and it also gave me some great ideas on how I am going to set up my inter website.

What I learned from my research and what could I have done better? 

Throughout my research I was constantly coming up with new ideas that I could do to make my website more interesting. 

One major idea was the review system.  Initially, I had no plans to put this on my website but after looking at competitor sites and seeing their missed opportunities, I realised that it would be a great idea to add it to my site. Including videos was another big feature. I mainly got this idea from looking at the websites that I looked at in Unit 12. Once again, I came up with this while doing my research, I am so glad I came up with the idea because it allows me to increase my skills in filming. I also came up with the R&U system, this wasn't included on the websites that I looked at however while I was submitting my survey to Reddit, I looked at the voting system and this struck inspiration.

This and the many other ideas that I had come up with could not have been realised unless I did the amount of valuable research that I did. I feel like I have benefited massively from my research and this just shows how important it is to carry out a lot of research even if you believe that it might not be all that useful. 

I think one area that could've been better is my interview, I felt like there was not much content in this area. the answers that I got were helpful but I would've liked to get a little more detail and maybe some other options.

Conclusion

All the research I have done into my audience has helped me out massively. At the start of the project, I believed that the main type of people the website will appeal to will be students who are maybe at university or just moving into their new home. People like this usually have very little knowledge about making things and may find reading instructions challenging or too time consuming.

However, from my research, I have found out that I should be aiming my website towards older adults, 20-40 because making your own furniture provided by companies is meant to be easy to understand and people from the younger generation usually do not struggle with this. People who are ages 20-40 struggle more, this may be because they buy more complex products from around the world than teens and university students would.

I also found out that I should be aiming my website more towards females because from the information that I had got from my survey, I found that females almost always run into a few problems while men,not so many. People who buy these sorts of products also usually have little to no skills in building things and people who do, usually just make the things they want without needing help or guidance. This once again, further backs up why I should make my website easy to understand. Places like ‘Ikea’ sell items that are quite low budget so I will be appealing to the middle-class/ slightly lower class region.