New planning grade: 15/20
New evaluation grade: 17/20
Total: 78/100
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Monday, 10 May 2010
Demographic Profile
Our target audience for our website are between the ages of 25 and 40. This is a wide range for a target audience but it is necessary because it must target everyone rather than just a small audience with 5 years as a boundary. They are working class as they will be able to afford to donate to the charity. They are male and female, all ethnicities, and all different statuses mainly because everyone can donate and our surveys show that this target audience is suitable for what we aim to do and that is to get donations for the charity and make people notice cancer more.
It is difficult to have a specific category for our target audience as nearly all working class people between 25 and 40 are perfect for our audience. Therefore we do not have a certain type of people that fit into our target audience to represent everyone, and so we must have to have a number of different categories to describe our target audience through demographics. We had worked out who our target audience were through our surveys that we carried out and discovered that any working class people male or female from any ethnicity or culture have an interest in our website.
When VALS are concerned (Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles) our target audience fits into the following categories, Achievers, Believers, Makers and Carers. I believe that Achievers fit into our target audience as they are people who want to make something of themselves in life, they are career orientated and working class. Believers are people who have the belief of importance to traditional things such as family, church and community and these are part of our target audience because they are working class and they believe that community is important. Makers are general working class people with a family life and are considered to be targeted because they have income and care for their family. Carers is one of the main categories because these are people who are environmentally friendly both nature and people which means that they are generous and care for others. Carers are the main source of donation and are the most interested in our website as they feel that we are part of them and helping their cause which is to take care of the world around them.
For young psychographics there are two main types that our target audience fit into and they are Utopians and Puritans. Utopians are our most interested audience as they want the world to be a better place meaning that our cause is good for helping community and the world come together which encourages utopians to donate and take interest in our media product. Puritans are people who want to do something for the better, and in addition they will be interested in our website because our website is attempting to help and others.
It is difficult to have a specific category for our target audience as nearly all working class people between 25 and 40 are perfect for our audience. Therefore we do not have a certain type of people that fit into our target audience to represent everyone, and so we must have to have a number of different categories to describe our target audience through demographics. We had worked out who our target audience were through our surveys that we carried out and discovered that any working class people male or female from any ethnicity or culture have an interest in our website.
When VALS are concerned (Values, Attitudes and Lifestyles) our target audience fits into the following categories, Achievers, Believers, Makers and Carers. I believe that Achievers fit into our target audience as they are people who want to make something of themselves in life, they are career orientated and working class. Believers are people who have the belief of importance to traditional things such as family, church and community and these are part of our target audience because they are working class and they believe that community is important. Makers are general working class people with a family life and are considered to be targeted because they have income and care for their family. Carers is one of the main categories because these are people who are environmentally friendly both nature and people which means that they are generous and care for others. Carers are the main source of donation and are the most interested in our website as they feel that we are part of them and helping their cause which is to take care of the world around them.
For young psychographics there are two main types that our target audience fit into and they are Utopians and Puritans. Utopians are our most interested audience as they want the world to be a better place meaning that our cause is good for helping community and the world come together which encourages utopians to donate and take interest in our media product. Puritans are people who want to do something for the better, and in addition they will be interested in our website because our website is attempting to help and others.
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Website Evaluation
Q1. Does your website follow or challenge forms and conventions?
Our campaign is called Journey Through Cancer and the campaign is to get people with the disease to join a community of people who want to forget their problems for a while yet be with people who understand what they are going through. We wanted the campaign website to have a welcoming feel and communicate that the organisation is supportive and friendly. The website is promoting a cancer charity and it does follow most conventions of charity sites like Cancer Research UK, Macmillan support and the American Cancer Society. The conventions followed by most of these sites we researched were the use of a logo at the top of the page, a navigation bar at the top near the logo or down the side and the use of columns to organise the page. One way in which we have challenged conventions of these sites is that we don’t use a lot of text as we feel that the visitor won’t want to strain their eyes on long pieces of text because they are looking for fun and escape, not boring details that will take up their time. Therefore we have cut down the text and made the font size larger. Sites aimed at the 30-40 age group like ours tend to follow layout conventions because they are for people who expect to be able to browse easily and find what they want quickly, so things should always be in the same place.
We had tried to follow most conventions of a normal charity website with the help of our website annotations and research, however we did add our own things what we thought would work well such as the different layout and a more simple logo. This is because it made us feel like our website was unique and different from other charity websites in some ways but in most other ways it reinforced the things from other charity sites like the graphics used with happy groups, advertisement relevant to the page or topic, types of links, tabs and pages and more.
Q2. How have you represented a particular social group?
We represented the target audience to themselves by using photographs showing people of their age group, cancer sufferers, looking happy and having fun with their families and friends. The message is that by joining this group, taking part in this community, the site visitor will also be able to have happy times and feel better.
The reason why our colour design of the website is mainly green is because green can connote good associations and feelings. For example Greenpeace is a charity where they “defend the natural world and promote peace”. In addition most charity websites have green as part of their theme and we have chose to have green in our website not only because most charity websites have it, but because it has many different connotations like health, nature, hope and growth. We want the site visitor to understand these things about our campaign so the campaign is understood as something positive.
Q3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
When researching the conventions of charity websites I discovered that it wasn’t the business themselves producing the website and advertising etc. Behind nearly all the businesses were an advertising company like Ogilvy UK. This is mainly because to advertise something you will need specialists in that area, therefore when looking at Cancer Research UK I found that Ogilvy UK advertised their campaigns and other big businesses campaigns also. Nowadays cancer is a big issue and cancer charities are very important and need big advertising campaigns. In addition, Ogilvy UK might distribute our website due to their familiar experiences with Cancer Research UK and other charities. This would be a perfect opportunity as they can use their experience and expertise to advertise our big campaign on cancer.
If we were going to distribute the site ourselves we would use a web hosting company. Web hosting is a service that allows individuals or business’s to store a website on the hosting server which is accessed through the WWW. Domain name’s are used to give a name to the website and make it easier to use rather than using an IP address or sockets to identify the websites. The domain name is part of the Domain system, which follows a structured naming system for any website connected to the internet or private or public networks. We would be able to arrange all of this ourselves without an advertising agency because we came up with the idea ourselves.
Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our target audience of the website are working class aged 30 to 40 as the research we have done proved that this age group were most in need of a website like ours. This is because in our survey this age group was most common as we were looking for the people who suffered from cancer or had someone close to them who suffered from cancer. To find out our target audience we took both demographics and psychographics into account as the values are very important otherwise the product will fail. These values include age, gender, lifestyle, class, attitudes and interests. Demographics helped us at the beginning of the targeting as it gives the basic understanding of the audience like age, gender, ethnicity whereas psychographics allowed us to further our understanding by finding out our audiences interests, lifestyles and attitudes towards cancer, charities, websites etc.
Q5. How have you targeted/attracted your target audience?
Some areas and pages on our website directly target the viewer and give them something to think about or have a view about or even have a life changing experience. An example of this is the extraordinary stories page whereby we have selected mostly true stories about cancer sufferers and how they coped in their experience. This includes how they felt, what it meant to them and what they were thinking at the time. These stories are a valuable source of information and are something extra to our website which gives it an edge as the viewer will want to know stories of sufferers and how they survived or how the ones that didn’t survive coped through their journey.
We created our logo in Photoshop and it is quite simple and basic yet colourful and this is because charities are very serious and also fun. Some of the charities we looked at had simple logos too with just text like MacMillan Cancer Society. However Cancer Research UK has text and an arrow which emphasizes the point about being serious but fun as the arrow is meaningful and has the connotations of moving forward.
All of the pages on our website are clear, easy and accessible and during our research we discovered that charity websites always have to be user friendly. We have added buttons on the sidebar of the page with a sky blue furry outline as it gives a “soft click” as we got from our feedback.
The news page describes research and the latest news about cancer, which some charity websites have. For example cancer Research uk has a News and Resources page which contains topics like statistics, health and living and more.
We have added many graphics to our pages as in our research in charity websites one of the most important conventions is to have images. These images are of people who are happy, united and having a group of 2 or more people illustrates to viewers that cancer is about family and friends and travelling through cancer together and having a more happy experience. This is the reason why most of our images contain 2 or more people to show people are happier when they are together and showing to cancer sufferers that they are not alone there is always someone and a place for them. In our images we have tried to include as much sunlight as possible to give a natural feeling to the website.
Our audio is played when the page loads and it is a calm and relaxing source of music which makes the website more user friendly. We created the music on a free music composer online called jam studio, which allowed us to login and save our own music. We applied the music to our website and enabled it to play in the background in a loop and on auto play, as this way people don’t just turn it off, they have the chance to stop, listen and think about their loved ones and the sufferers of cancer.
With our images we attempted to put together a slideshow giving a similar message to the viewer as other charity websites. This involves text in the image and people being happy usually containing 2 or more people. An example of this can be found at the American Cancer Society website where it starts when you enter the page and displays text then switches to more text continuing from the first with a picture of a smiling woman saying “donate now” and as the slideshow finishes more people appear behind the woman all together being happy. This is what we tried to achieve as it means that the site offers a society of support and happiness to get through cancer.
In our images on the website, their backgrounds are one of the most important things about the picture as it shows the surroundings of the people or person. This may show happiness, light, socialising and looking at the future. These are very significant as we believe these should be shown on our website as it passes these feelings on to the person or people viewing them. In our images we have included 2 or more people being happy as it suits our target audience and our message.
Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In the time creating our website I have learnt many new techniques in different areas like the software such as safari, iWeb, Adobe Photoshop and how to use them to crate graphics, websites and to research. Using Apple Mac computers at first was a new and hard experience specifically when creating the preliminary task but after one to two weeks I managed to understand in which it worked and iWeb tools worked as normally I use the Windows operating systems such as XP and Vista. Therefore when it came to creating my main task with the help of my partner Tarikh our knowledge and understanding of the operating system and programs became more advanced by the day and we were able to use them with ease. If I was to do the tasks again I definitely would practice with the tools, programs and operating system as I do feel if I were to do this I would have had much more time to create and improve the website to the maximum.
Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
The preliminary task was difficult to begin with as I was learning the software and operating system. I had used Macromedia Dream weaver at GCSE so I was familiar with website design but not the new software. My task was to create a school website aimed at parents and teenagers because the school was for teenagers and their parents are interested in their son/daughters education. During the process of making this website I became more knowledgeable with the software and system I was using, and I learnt how to create new things like slideshows, how to edit movies, how to apply graphics and audio, and the web inspector in iWeb and more.
Our campaign is called Journey Through Cancer and the campaign is to get people with the disease to join a community of people who want to forget their problems for a while yet be with people who understand what they are going through. We wanted the campaign website to have a welcoming feel and communicate that the organisation is supportive and friendly. The website is promoting a cancer charity and it does follow most conventions of charity sites like Cancer Research UK, Macmillan support and the American Cancer Society. The conventions followed by most of these sites we researched were the use of a logo at the top of the page, a navigation bar at the top near the logo or down the side and the use of columns to organise the page. One way in which we have challenged conventions of these sites is that we don’t use a lot of text as we feel that the visitor won’t want to strain their eyes on long pieces of text because they are looking for fun and escape, not boring details that will take up their time. Therefore we have cut down the text and made the font size larger. Sites aimed at the 30-40 age group like ours tend to follow layout conventions because they are for people who expect to be able to browse easily and find what they want quickly, so things should always be in the same place.
We had tried to follow most conventions of a normal charity website with the help of our website annotations and research, however we did add our own things what we thought would work well such as the different layout and a more simple logo. This is because it made us feel like our website was unique and different from other charity websites in some ways but in most other ways it reinforced the things from other charity sites like the graphics used with happy groups, advertisement relevant to the page or topic, types of links, tabs and pages and more.
Q2. How have you represented a particular social group?
We represented the target audience to themselves by using photographs showing people of their age group, cancer sufferers, looking happy and having fun with their families and friends. The message is that by joining this group, taking part in this community, the site visitor will also be able to have happy times and feel better.
The reason why our colour design of the website is mainly green is because green can connote good associations and feelings. For example Greenpeace is a charity where they “defend the natural world and promote peace”. In addition most charity websites have green as part of their theme and we have chose to have green in our website not only because most charity websites have it, but because it has many different connotations like health, nature, hope and growth. We want the site visitor to understand these things about our campaign so the campaign is understood as something positive.
Q3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
When researching the conventions of charity websites I discovered that it wasn’t the business themselves producing the website and advertising etc. Behind nearly all the businesses were an advertising company like Ogilvy UK. This is mainly because to advertise something you will need specialists in that area, therefore when looking at Cancer Research UK I found that Ogilvy UK advertised their campaigns and other big businesses campaigns also. Nowadays cancer is a big issue and cancer charities are very important and need big advertising campaigns. In addition, Ogilvy UK might distribute our website due to their familiar experiences with Cancer Research UK and other charities. This would be a perfect opportunity as they can use their experience and expertise to advertise our big campaign on cancer.
If we were going to distribute the site ourselves we would use a web hosting company. Web hosting is a service that allows individuals or business’s to store a website on the hosting server which is accessed through the WWW. Domain name’s are used to give a name to the website and make it easier to use rather than using an IP address or sockets to identify the websites. The domain name is part of the Domain system, which follows a structured naming system for any website connected to the internet or private or public networks. We would be able to arrange all of this ourselves without an advertising agency because we came up with the idea ourselves.
Q4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Our target audience of the website are working class aged 30 to 40 as the research we have done proved that this age group were most in need of a website like ours. This is because in our survey this age group was most common as we were looking for the people who suffered from cancer or had someone close to them who suffered from cancer. To find out our target audience we took both demographics and psychographics into account as the values are very important otherwise the product will fail. These values include age, gender, lifestyle, class, attitudes and interests. Demographics helped us at the beginning of the targeting as it gives the basic understanding of the audience like age, gender, ethnicity whereas psychographics allowed us to further our understanding by finding out our audiences interests, lifestyles and attitudes towards cancer, charities, websites etc.
Q5. How have you targeted/attracted your target audience?
Some areas and pages on our website directly target the viewer and give them something to think about or have a view about or even have a life changing experience. An example of this is the extraordinary stories page whereby we have selected mostly true stories about cancer sufferers and how they coped in their experience. This includes how they felt, what it meant to them and what they were thinking at the time. These stories are a valuable source of information and are something extra to our website which gives it an edge as the viewer will want to know stories of sufferers and how they survived or how the ones that didn’t survive coped through their journey.
We created our logo in Photoshop and it is quite simple and basic yet colourful and this is because charities are very serious and also fun. Some of the charities we looked at had simple logos too with just text like MacMillan Cancer Society. However Cancer Research UK has text and an arrow which emphasizes the point about being serious but fun as the arrow is meaningful and has the connotations of moving forward.
All of the pages on our website are clear, easy and accessible and during our research we discovered that charity websites always have to be user friendly. We have added buttons on the sidebar of the page with a sky blue furry outline as it gives a “soft click” as we got from our feedback.
The news page describes research and the latest news about cancer, which some charity websites have. For example cancer Research uk has a News and Resources page which contains topics like statistics, health and living and more.
We have added many graphics to our pages as in our research in charity websites one of the most important conventions is to have images. These images are of people who are happy, united and having a group of 2 or more people illustrates to viewers that cancer is about family and friends and travelling through cancer together and having a more happy experience. This is the reason why most of our images contain 2 or more people to show people are happier when they are together and showing to cancer sufferers that they are not alone there is always someone and a place for them. In our images we have tried to include as much sunlight as possible to give a natural feeling to the website.
Our audio is played when the page loads and it is a calm and relaxing source of music which makes the website more user friendly. We created the music on a free music composer online called jam studio, which allowed us to login and save our own music. We applied the music to our website and enabled it to play in the background in a loop and on auto play, as this way people don’t just turn it off, they have the chance to stop, listen and think about their loved ones and the sufferers of cancer.
With our images we attempted to put together a slideshow giving a similar message to the viewer as other charity websites. This involves text in the image and people being happy usually containing 2 or more people. An example of this can be found at the American Cancer Society website where it starts when you enter the page and displays text then switches to more text continuing from the first with a picture of a smiling woman saying “donate now” and as the slideshow finishes more people appear behind the woman all together being happy. This is what we tried to achieve as it means that the site offers a society of support and happiness to get through cancer.
In our images on the website, their backgrounds are one of the most important things about the picture as it shows the surroundings of the people or person. This may show happiness, light, socialising and looking at the future. These are very significant as we believe these should be shown on our website as it passes these feelings on to the person or people viewing them. In our images we have included 2 or more people being happy as it suits our target audience and our message.
Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In the time creating our website I have learnt many new techniques in different areas like the software such as safari, iWeb, Adobe Photoshop and how to use them to crate graphics, websites and to research. Using Apple Mac computers at first was a new and hard experience specifically when creating the preliminary task but after one to two weeks I managed to understand in which it worked and iWeb tools worked as normally I use the Windows operating systems such as XP and Vista. Therefore when it came to creating my main task with the help of my partner Tarikh our knowledge and understanding of the operating system and programs became more advanced by the day and we were able to use them with ease. If I was to do the tasks again I definitely would practice with the tools, programs and operating system as I do feel if I were to do this I would have had much more time to create and improve the website to the maximum.
Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
The preliminary task was difficult to begin with as I was learning the software and operating system. I had used Macromedia Dream weaver at GCSE so I was familiar with website design but not the new software. My task was to create a school website aimed at parents and teenagers because the school was for teenagers and their parents are interested in their son/daughters education. During the process of making this website I became more knowledgeable with the software and system I was using, and I learnt how to create new things like slideshows, how to edit movies, how to apply graphics and audio, and the web inspector in iWeb and more.
Friday, 4 December 2009
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