I’m happy with the website that Aaran and I have designed during the course of PPD 4. This project has gone quite smoothly for us because we have both had very similar ideas of how we wanted the site to look right from the outset. We kept in touch and bounced ideas off each other all through the project to ensure that we were both on the same page when it came to building the site.
At the start of the project we sat down and each drew a mock up site using Photoshop, and our designs were both very similar. We then decided that it would be best to research existing exhibition and gallery sites to see what kind of designs that they had used. I looked at the way they’d used each page including: negative space, navigation bars, images, accessibility and I also made not of the loading times of every page.
To continue on from that I looked at various websites that gave tips on how to design your own website and I took on board the advice that was given to me. Since I used to study web design I dug out some of my old research but found that a lot of it was now out-dated and useless to me, but there were still one or two things that would prove useful to me and Aaran.
We sat down in the baseroom and looked at various ways we could build the site and we’d decided that it would be practical to design a website using Wordpress. I was keen on the idea of building the site myself using Dreamweaver or other programs of a similar nature but this would have been risky because it’s been a while since I’ve built a website using this method. There are plenty of things that could also go wring with building a site in that manner. I would find it hard to keep on top of the coding, ensuring the every line is correct. It would also have been very time consuming, and time is something that we didn’t have a lot of due to other commitments with the course and work places.
I started to conduct some research by looking at WordPress and how you can use themes and custom layouts to design your website. Carla, who was creating the mailing lists, made me aware of a website that allows you to purchase WordPress layouts and upload them to your website. I purchased a subscription to the site with the intention of using it on my own site, but I used it on the exhibitions site as well.
I looked into various hosting methods and found that the cheapest way to host the site was through GoDaddy because they had the option of purchasing hosting for 3 months, where other sites only let you purchase a minimum of 12 months hosting.
Aaran and I had also settled on a domain name of ‘picknmixexhibition.co.uk’ we had wanted something else such as ‘picknmixleeds’ or something to that effect but a lot of the domains had already been purchased by other people.
Once we had the domain and hosting we could start building the site. We selected a theme from the website that Carla gave us, and began customising it, gradually building it as the weeks went by.
We created all of the pages that we’d planned on building at the start apart from the ‘store’ section of the site where visitors to the exhibition would have the chance to purchase a print from us. The process involved in setting up this page was proving to be very difficult and we ended up running out of time, which is a shame.
Aside from that we have managed to create what we had visualised at the start of the project. We’d created a site that was clean, simple, easy to navigate and provided the information that visitors to the site would most likely want.
Due to my background in web and graphic design I found this project very easy, as I was used to working in this way. Instead of having to research into websites in-depth I merely had to refresh my memory to remember what I had to do.
I don’t think there’s anything that I would change if I were to do this task again. Aaran and I communicated with each other the whole way through the project, we both had a big input into the way that the site was designed and we had it completed on time. There was nothing wrong with the site that I had found, no broken links or images. Everything worked perfectly.
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