Web Project
My aim was to create a website based around photo manipulation. I wanted to link the website closely to my essay so I had to find appropriate material to link the two together. My essay focuses on models and how their bodies are manipulated to make them look thinner, I did use other sources for the essay but I decided to keep my website focused on this alone. In my essay I took most of my resources from Meltzer (1996) and in particular the quote “Even positive intent can lead to distortion.” This quote is featured on the main page of my website as it sums up the aim of my website and it gave me a good starting point on creating and designing the page.
I used moonfruit to create the website. This is a free online programme that allows you to create a website quickly and easily. I started off by choosing a ‘theme’ for the page; the web creator had many different styles to choose from. I decided to choose a simplistic theme that would not distract away from the content on the page. The colour scheme for the website is a orange and yellow theme against a white background and any text written is in black. From looking about on the internet I decided that these simplistic colours are eye catching, and the white background works very well as the text is easy to read against it. As the website creator provides a readymade template to work with, the only thing you have to do is select a theme for the site and get to editing it straight away.
For the main page I added some photoshopped images that I had collected on the internet to introduce my theme for the rest of the site. I decided to put these images on the main page because it is eye catching and introduces my first paragraph well. I did have a bit of difficulty using the tools on the site to begin with as it is not a site I have had to use before. My main confusion here was how to upload a photograph to a page – but once learning how to do so I found the website very easy to use and looked very stylish overall.
One thing I really wanted to include on the website was a variety of examples of photo manipulation. I found a tool on the site that allowed me to create a grid that I could place images into. Not only could I drop the images into the boxes but I could also annotate them as well. This created a tidy and informative page which fit into the theme of the website perfectly. Before I could put the images onto the webpage I had to make sure that the resolution of the images was high enough – I checked this in Adobe Photoshop before putting them onto the site. If the images are not of high resolution the images can look grainy and not of high quality – I wanted to make sure that only high quality images were used on the site to keep the overall quality of the website high.
The ‘link’ tool was the best one on the page. When hyper linking to other web pages it can often get complicated and links sometimes do not work. On Moonfruit I just had to enter the web address I wanted to link to and the button was created automatically. These links were vital in the site as they directed the audience straight to my resources and also allowed me to evaluate other works with the link directly with the evaluation.
The content of the website was very important so I made sure that I found appropriate sources to support my argument on the site. On one of the links I managed to find a video that actually demonstrated the process of airbrushing a model on Photoshop. I would have liked to have embedded the video on my website but I was not sure how to do this. If I had more time I would have liked to have learnt how to do this as it would have been a nice feature on my site.
As the emphasis was on the content of the website I needed to make sure that any text on the page was easy to read and there was not too much text on each page. I did this by breaking up the text with images and creating more pages instead of putting all of the information onto one page. I found this worked well as the pages were clearly named on the tabs at the top of the website so you can find what you are looking for more easily.
The creation of the site was a very enjoyable and interesting process and I have learnt that you do not need an extensive knowledge on web design to create a professional looking page. This is something I am looking forward to doing again in the future and will use this programme again. I would like to have had a bit more choice in choosing the original theme for the page – but to use some of the other designs you did have to pay for a subscription to the site. Despite some aspects requiring a membership this did not get in the way of the creation of the site and I felt that the tools provided for a free membership were more than adequate.
I am pleased with the way my website turned out – the Moonfruit programme used to create it was very user friendly and allowed me to create a professional looking website. If I was to make the website again I would probably include more pages and would expand on my topic more so I could include more content on the page. But overall I am proud with what I have achieved and pleased with the skills I have learnt from the programme we used to create the website on.
