Appendix 1 SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Included in the website is some Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short. After doing a little bit of research into the topic, I discovered 2 areas I included in my website.

The first of those areas, was Meta Tags. Doing a little Research into Meta tags, I discovered that there are a few types of Meta tags, the most common two being Keywords, which is now infamous on the web and very few Search engines look at them, and Description, Which I decided to include in my website.

The other Way was to include Site Maps, Which can be generated online for free, and Which I included both a HTML and a XML Site map in the pages that were relevant.

A way to show the results of the SEO is using google analytics, which records the data of each user who visits the site. I've also Included this into the website and have taken a Screenshot of Google Analytics for the website.

Review

In my mind, I felt like had couldn't get to grips with the design techniques thatwere being taught, but after a while, I designed the way it felt right and so I think I'll have to work out my own ways of designing, in a more practical sence in future projects.

From a coding point of view, I feel that I didn't do well, and I don't really enjoy working with code, and for any project in the future, I hope I will be able to concentrate more on the Front End Design rather than the Code.

With SEO, I feel like it's something I could do, and if I put my mind to it could really work with it, But I just don't find it as appeling as Designing the Front end of a website, and the SEO may have lacked in quality.

Finally, overall, I don't think I left myself enough time to work well with the code and SEO, and concentrated a lot of my efforts on the design. If I had another chance to do this project, I would spread my concentration over all 3 aspects of this module more than I have already, making a more even balence of Code, to SEO, to design.

Finished Design

http://mwilkinson.artdesignhull.ac.uk/

Re-Designing Stages

After realising my inital idea wasn't working, I moved onto another wireframe and started using colour wheels to get a sence of colours and ideas, and after fitting a blue that matched my inital colour idea, I worked with some stock images and created the current version of the design, Which I coded and put together to create the final Design.

Initial Mock-up

After going though the previous steps mentioned in my previous posts, I came to design a mock up website. I knew the wireframe I was using and the sizes and all the little details and the colours, what resulted is the image below.

After pulling back and looking at the over layout, I could tell it wasn't right, the image took over too much of the area and there was really not enough room for it to look comfortable. Nevertheless, I showed it to the rest of my classmates.

The Responses were fair and justified, the most obvious one was the colours just weren't right. Also, there was some confusion becasue the image suggested that the website was promoting a restaurant rather than a literacy festival. At this point, I felt like I was going back to the proverbial drawing board.

Wireframing

Once I started with my Mood Board, I decided to work on the kind of structure the website would have. I started off with quite a few sketchy efforts, working some initial ideas out of my head. I already had another design in mind, after seeing a design inside the book, Head First Web Design (Watrall & Siarto, page 203). With that design in mind, I pushed forward with a few finalised, which I put down onto paper, all 4 of which are in the Image below.

Initial Ideas

After an initial meeting with the client, my first thoughts were to try to stick to the council's colour scheme with what regards colours. So using the sand colour to start with, and expanding into other colours that were within the range of colours. The two problems with this is that the colour scheme didn't fit that well together, a wide variety of colours were too much to handle, and the colours just didn't quite look right on the screen, So I decided to stick to one colour from the range, which the client decided to use for the 2009 festival, the sand colour. I also began to link the colour to the colour of book pages, focusing on keeping the main focus point of the website fairly bland so that the client could adjust the mood and the feel of the website, or a post on the website, just by adding some colour though a picture or by some other means.

Once I had these Ideas I put them down onto a Mood Board. I started off with writing down some important key items that are usually associated with Literacy, working onto colours, using a page from a book as a reference, and finally researching fonts associated with the printed word.

The mood board is below.