Week 5

I've changed my mind as to which music festival site I am doing for my assignement. I did a couple of different web designs and decided to go with National Folk Festival. I've now uploaded this onto the unit site under Gallaries.

Week 4

I've created my first HTML document. To do this I followed the exercise in Chapter 4 of the Learning Web Design text book.

I've also started working on my website design in Photoshop. So far so good. I've never used Photoshop before so it's taking me a while to get the hang of it. I've found that there is a lot of useful information on the Internet, particularly on how to use Photoshop. I've also invested in a book called Photoshop for dummies...

Design Reference

I’ve chosen 5 music festival websites for my design reference post. The sites are:

1. Glastonbury Festival – in the UK
2. Byron Bay Arts and Music Festival
3. Falls Festival
4. Good Vibrations Festival
5. Coachella – California USA

I’ve used some of Steve Krug’s web standards from the ‘Trunk Test' within my 7 Characteristics, which include:
1. Logo
2. Content/page name
3. Sections
4. Local navigation
5. Colours/design
6. Usability
7. Search function

I've highlighted some of these characteristics in the screen dumps below.

Glastonbury

Byron Bay

Falls Festival

Good Vibrations

Coachella

Summary

Each of the above sites has a logo at the top of the page, some of which the logo is also a Home page button. The good thing about this is it allows the user to identify and brand the site. Other aesthetics shared by all the sites are:

1. a header
2. navigation/menu bar – which allows one to view other sections of the site
3. context/information
4. links
5. design features

6. colour for excitement

These characteristics allow the user to navigate easily throughout the site, and know where they are at all times.

A couple of other features I personally like are:

• Quick loading


• Reduced size images


• Menu at the top


• Logo linked to home page


• Easy to navigate. I like the fact that the Falls Festival site used SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/ it’s a simple yet effective way to present a range of images.

The Falls Festival site has also taken into consideration user preference for those who have slow internet speeds. to achieve this the designer has created an entry page where it allows you to choose the speed of your internet connection.

I believe that these conventions are relevant to the site I will be developing and will try to incorporate some/most of these features into my site.

Week 2

In the tut we discussed what needs to be done to complete the Design Reference assessment. I've done a bit of research through examining a range of music festival sites both in Australia and Overseas.

Here is a list of site that I’ve looked at:

Big Day Out
Good Vibrations
V Festival
Future Music Festival
We Love Sounds
Coachella – California
Glastonbury – UK
Reading - UK
Leeds - UK
Creamfields – UK

The thing I found interesting is that if tickets aren’t on sale the website isn’t very interactive.

So for this week, I’m still waiting on my text book to come in… But on a positive note, I’ve chosen my 5 sites and my 7 characteristics that I will be analysing for my Design Reference.