Website Building

Our last project for Digital Communication's class is to build a website! 

Strategy:

As of right now, my strategy is to get a job and begin working after college for a few years, and perhaps go to graduate school after making enough money to pay for graduate school. Therefore, my website's objective will be to attract employers. Of course, I will need a couple of more internships to build my resume before landing an actual job post-grad, and therefore this website will first be showing the skills that I have developed and learned from past internship experiences as well as from my classes here at Furman. I also intend on looking for jobs overseas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Shanghai - and therefore I may add Chinese text to let employers know that I am bilingual. It is important to note that I am looking for but not limited to public relations firms, magazines, or advertising companies.

Scope:

Things that I will need in order to brand myself include -

• Contact form (this will include email and phone number)
• Widget that will link to my Facebook page
• Will create a Photography section page that will showcase the photography work I have done for City Weekend magazine in Shanghai and for The Paladin Newspaper
• I will my include my resume that has all my past experiences 
• Because I am possibly attempting to land a job at a magazine, I may also create a section on the website for writing samples
• About me section that will talk about my background and history that I feel like will probably be what sets me apart from everyone else, but won't be too extremely lengthly. Will keep it short and concise. 

5 Inspirations:

I love this simple layout, with four sections neatly on the top, against  a single solid yet eye-catching and bold color. I guess you could call me a minimalist. I also love the idea of the main background showcasing photography skills. It's a show, not tell kind of concept.

Again, I love the simplicity of these little icons (if that's what you call it! :O) at the end of the website that don't distract and are easy to click on, with all the icons placed neatly one after another.

I love this website! It is so cool, so clean and so fresh. 

I particularly like the idea of the very simple logo in the center against the beautiful landscape.

If we have learned anything from our last couple of readings, it is that we want the website to be user-friendly and I believe this website has achieved that. When you scroll down the page, it has a "scroll icon" on the left that isn't too distracting. Also, a little bar at the bottom appears with the company's address and other information.

Website Link: http://www.seattlecidercompany.com/

I also really like this website that does online marketing campaigns and how they show off their past experiences with these three pictures:

Websites

    

   In this week's reading of Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, Redish talks about the important aspects of what websites do to attract their audience. Obviously there are websites that are geared towards different types of people and interests - female, male, sports, music, etc. I went through the list of websites that I typically visit a couple times a day which is really anything from Facebook to different blogs to Pinterest to Facebook. In the end, I went to 8tracks.com, which is an online radio where you can search for music by genre and also create playlists to share with friends. Apparently, according to my sister, this website was like, so last year(ha ha) but I still love it anyways.

One of the main things I got out of Redish's reading was that it is so important to know your audience. For websites like Amazon or something super general, the demographics and age groups and stuff are anywhere from teenagers to people in their 60s and 70s (i'm guessing). But anyways, the demographics for 8tracks.com is pretty much teenagers and people in their early to late twenties, maybe even thirties. You can tell this by the names of the playlists that people upload (i.e uuuuuuuh yeah or "if we were a movie"). 



The point is, this internet online radio is so successful because of how simplistic the website is. As Redish points out, "all of us interpret what we read in light of our own knowledge and experiences." Literally, there are only so many buttons on the home page. There's Explore, which gives you a variety of genres, then theres Login and Signup. It's a complete no-brainer. 

Redish even pointed this out through these cartoon drawings of people with bubbles of what people might say. Literally all of them say the same thing just in different ways - that they want efficiency. Whoever created this website knew it would most likely attract this age-group of teenagers/young-adults whatever you want to call them, and knew that we are probably the biggest age group who would really not want to spend the time trying to figure out how to navigate to places and stuff!

Another thing that I think this site does really well is the fact that they use a lot of visuals without being overwhelming. I may be biased when I say that their use of visuals is really good because I am a visual person, and that is what attracts me first. Every playlist basically has a picture, very instagram-y/hipster-y which is the type of people that this website is obviously serving.