News Production: Website


Making the Website

Creating our website was something that we had all had a bit of experience in. During my A levels I was required to create my own website. This meant I had learned previous skills on the typography, font, layout, visual style, Colour pallets and wire frames.

I have used wireframes on numerous occasions when designing, or gathering some initial ideas. An example is when I was planning/designing our website thumbnail sketching. This was a good time saving strategy for me as it saved designing specifically on content for a rough plan.We were able to then include our website content such as our section on top tips. Wire frames are a simple layout, (usually just black and white) that outlines the specific size and placement of page elements, site features, conversion areas and navigation for the website. In effect they are the websites blueprint, as it demonstrates the structure. We were using a website creator called ‘Wix’ so much of the templates and wire frames are a standard.

Typography

Typography is the font style and size used. It is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line-spacing, letter-spacing, and adjusting the space within letters pairs. It usually needs to be in relation to the actual design or theme. For example, the title for a horror film wouldn’t be written in Bauhaus 93 because it wouldn’t work well in relation to the theme, giving different connotations to what is actually intended. The typography we intended to use on our website was to vary depending on which section it was. The titles were typed in ‘Chelsea Market’. 

The rest of the typography was using COMIC SANS MS.  Using this typography gave our website a unique design compared to others available online. The picture to the side here is a screenshot of our website with the typography. In the media industry typography is used everywhere, especially in advertising. It’s important to instantly capture the audience’s attention. Obviously again, it would need to be in relation to what they’re actually advertising otherwise it would be irrelevant and unnecessary.

Short Cuts

Short Cuts on top menu bar
Shortcuts are efficient time saving methods used on websites to enable the users to navigate around easily. This is usually done using buttons, which act as shortcuts rather than going through each individual page to find what you are looking for which would be really time consuming. We have used shortcuts when making our own news channel website, which was relatively straight forward. Luckily we didn’t have that many different pages compared to what other websites may have where they have a lot more content. However, this was still useful nevertheless, as it meant website transitions were a lot smoother and user friendly. The picture to the right is of our final buttons/shortcut outcome. The design changed, and I feel it gave a cleaner aesthetic appearance, and coordinated well in relation to the rest of the webpage.


The visual Style is how the content looks overall, which can include the colour scheme, font, layout structure or even practicality. I have used visual style for most things in this television production course , and a prime example is with filming . Here I needed to make the website as aesthetically appealing as possible, and maintain a professional standard in doing so.

Website Mood-board

Colour palettes

Colour pallets refer to the colour scheme used and how well they actually go together. If a website was to use completely contrasting colours, or its colour scheme was inconsistent it would completely lose its professional appearance. Sometimes this can actually depend on the target audience. For example, younger children would like to see various bright colours whereas an adult’s colour choice would differ to something plainer, and keep it a consistent theme throughout.

When making our own film club website, we wanted to include a mustard yellow/gold and dark blue theme throughout. This was inspired by my mood board, where we noticed there was a lot of this colour. We also use this color in our graphics as there is a gold rope and dark blue graduation hat. We would use a coloured background because we felt as though anything to complex distracts for the actual website information and can look slightly informal (again this website wasn’t really aimed at children; its students who want some colour but not necessarily anything to bright and patronising). From market research I established that modern websites have a more minimalistic design.




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