Self Evaluation

     For this module the task given was to design a website that would promote our own work and photography. I really liked the sound of this module when I first heard it because I enjoy designing things and really like the graphics side of it as I enjoy graphics. At the beginning I had a slight idea of how I would like my website to be, only because I know what I like myself when looking through a website. This being the case I starting researching websites that I liked and felt worked really well and others that I felt didn’t work so well. Once doing this I got an idea of aspects from different websites that I would like to create and have similar functions in my own. After researching other website’s I created a wireframe so I could get a visual idea of what my website might look like, I also created a sitemap for my website so I could decide what navigation I would need on it. I also had to think of the kind of audience that would be visiting my website and who would be interested and looking at my images and work so I had to also take that into account.
     When I had done this and got feedback from my proposal and wireframes and ideas I started on creating my own logos in photo shop which I could use for the header on my website and then started designing on photo shop on the computer.
     The first thing I decided on was my layout so used my wireframe to create the same layout on the computer then I had to decide my colour scheme. For the colour scheme I decided that I wanted it to be quite plain and not have too much colour on it, reason being because I prefer more simple clean looking websites and don’t like too much colour on them and with picking the colour I did I felt like it would complement all my images on my website and not be to over powering, the colours I chose were white and a light lilac colour.
     Next thing after creating the frame for my website was choosing the font of my writing and which header I would use. I narrowed down the headers to two I liked and then asked people’s opinions on them and people preferred the one I decided to use. I then took a while to decide on my font for my navigation bar and changed it a few times but finally came up with one that I felt was easy for people to read and fit in well with the whole site. The next thing I decided on was my image for my homepage I chose the one I did because the colours in my image fit in really well with the colour scheme of the website so felt it would work well and also wouldn’t get old or dated.
     The images I chose to show as an example of a page of my website were images I felt showed the work that I most enjoy creating. I had these images under the category of ‘Personal’ because it was the kind of work I do in my own time and do for myself. I also showed how my about page would look for this I used a simple font that would be easy to read and didn’t write it too formal as I wanted my personality to show through and wanted people to feel like I had wrote it as if I was talking to them.
     For the whole of my website my layout doesn’t change, all that changes is when you click on a category the image in the middle and the thumbnails of the images, everything else stays the same. I designed it like this because I didn’t want my website to be complicated in any way I wanted it to be simple to use so that anyone can use it and I wanted it to be simple but effective.
     Overall I feel that my website looks professional and works well with how I wanted it to look and work. The main part of this brief was to help strengthen our skills on photo shop and I feel that I really have and learnt a vast amount more about photo shop and how to do certain things that I never knew about before. I really enjoyed this brief and it has been my favourite one to date and would love to do something else like this again.