25th January 2011 - Page Layout

I finished my page layout to make it look neat and contain everything I am going to do for my website.  

I am going to include a banner at the top of the page with the school name, logo and slogan.  I will design all of this in Photoshop with the appropriate font for a school website.  I will have three columns - as I found that this is what school websites conventionally use.  In the middle column I will use moving images to show the school and links and information on either side of this.  I will also include a search bar and a newsletter where parents can enter their email address to retrieve this.  A Headteacher's welcome is present on every school website I researched describing why it is the right school for your child, so I will include this.   

My media page will be consistent to the homepage keeping the banner present, however there will be images and a video on the right hand side and information on the left.  My colour theme will be fairly basic and not too colourful as parents may be 'put off' if the website looks too childish.

24th January 2011 - Design

I finished my brief and then started to design my page layout, including colours and the links I am going to include. 

21st January 2011 - Brief

On the 21st of December, I started to write my brief on what my school website was going to include.  I included things such as colour themes, layout and the content of the website.

The list -

Hi Charlie -
Your blog is looking very good. This is a list of work to check against so that everything is in place.

Creating your blog.
Using a camera introduction
Photoshop your picture/s and post to blog.
Research on four school websites: 400 words short essay.
Survey.
Catchup, including survey, annotated websites.
Draft brief for preliminary site.
Page layout.
Photoshop, first artwork.

HM

20th January 2011 - Survey

After planning the survey in the previous lesson, my partner and I began to put the information into tables ready to print off to be answered by 10-15 parents with children currently in education.  Here is what my survey looks like.

Survey

19th January 2011 - Survey

On Wednesday the 19th of January, I began to plan my survey and consider different formats of questions such as rating in order of preference and multiple choice answers.  I began to think of different types of questions including demographics (information about the person) and psychographics (what the person likes).  Overall I planned 8 questions.

18th January 2011 - Site Research

On the 18th of January, we researched different school websites such as Ravens Wood School and Hayes School.  We compared the websites to see the different techniques the schools used to present themselves.  I found that common conventions in websites are in the layout - including positioning on the page, as well as fonts and photographs.  I also found that the colour themes used for the websites were generally the colour theme of the school, such as blue for Hayes School and green for Ravens Wood.  Here is my preliminary website research on different schools. 

Preliminary site research

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17th January 2011 - Using Photoshop

On the 17th of January, we edited the photographs from the previous lesson on Photoshop, experimenting with colour, brightness and contrast.  We also made the object in the foreground come in to focus by taking an extract and blurring the background. Experimenting with Photoshop helped to see what techniques could be useful for photographs later throughout our production work.  Here is an example of how I edited one of the photographs. 

I changed the contrast and colours and then added a 'grain' effect - giving the image a slight texture.  I think this looks effective, however, maybe I could make the two characters stand out more.

14th January 2011 - Using a Camera

On the 14th of January, we started to take photographs, considering light and the background setting.  We took close up photographs and photographs which were taken from a slight distance.  We are going to use these photographs to edit on Photoshop in the next lesson.  Here are a few photos to show how we considered lighting and positioning.

13th January 2011 - Setting up Blogspot

On the 13th of January, we signed up to Blogspot to create our blog.  We changed the background, font and layout to make the blog more personal.  Here we can post what we achieve throughout lessons for our production work.