I decided to create this blog post to showcase my website using some screenshots and justifying why I have made things the way I have! I have made a blog post prior to this showing my experimentation with WIX.
The process of making a website is a lot longer than I had anticipated, I think the reason for this would be because when I last made a website portfolio I only needed to add my image onto the website and an about page, where as this time around I had created a whole brand and products that I needed to set out professionally. I needed to add a shop page, think about light boxes, transitions, what happens when you hover the mouse over certain things and more.
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| Slogan Transitions |
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| Hover & overlay options... |
Something I decided to add to my website was a Spotify playlist that plays some 'cafe music'. Initially I wasn't going to have any music playing as I couldn't decide on the type of vibe I wanted to musically portray to my audience, therefore by sticking to something such as cafe music it allows customers to almost relax and perhaps not notice it playing, and are therefore less inclined to want to turn the music off or just shut the browser! This in theory I thought was a really good way to interact with the audience in a subtle manner, however upon reviewing my decisions and pin pointing my 'what went well' and 'even better if's' I decided to remove this. The reason for that being that you needed spotify in order to play the music and it also half showed up on a smaller laptop and look out of place!
In this screen shot you can see the difference of the Home page on a desktop and a mobile device. For my logo I could't add it in and get it arranged the way I thought looked good so I decided to stick with a similar font and just have that on the home page. I think my site looks best on a desktop as transitions and some extra's are available on a desktop. When producing my site I knew it would look slightly different on a mobile device however I didn't think it would be a different as it is so if I could go back and adjust or alter some things I would try and find a template or way of arranging things that made it look a little bit more professional on a mobile!
These screenshots on my iPhone clearly show the difference in layout, so I decided to insert screenshots of my desktop below to compare and contrast:
The interesting thing for me was I was viewing the website differently depending on the desktop I was using. for the first screen shot on the left I used my Macbook, then the one on the right shows what it looks like on a larger iMac, which is interesting because the 'Half Way There' slogan didn't seem to appear at the time when I was completing this, however I can guarantee it is there!
When creating this website I didn't realise how much technical work it would take for things such as layout to be done correctly, I think if you weren't looking into too much depth the website looks nice on a smaller screen however on the big screen you can see everything.
On a positive note I think I managed to incorporate my colour scheme and over all vibe I tried to achieve with my products and portray that onto my website without having it be too repetitive. I wanted to add some of my own images as you can see, however I have of course taken a lot more images but I found they didn't really work too well when 'bombarded' so I decided to stick to the more minimalistic side to things, as my demographic have clearly stated that is something they prefer.
Relating this to my demographic and how throughout this project I have constantly been referring to my audience more so than last year it has enabled me to develop as a person and creator. The audience are the focus in any project, so aiming to please them is the goal. When looking in to this it was clear to me - as you would have read in blog posts- that minimalism in particular is something that females ages 18-25 prefer and gravitate towards, I feel as though now a days when things are 'too much effort' or perhaps 'too intricate' people don't bother. I think my website is very to the point, it gives you information about my brand, the products I sell, along with images of the products being used, and in photoshoot like environments. Navigating around the site is simple, hence why I wanted to stick to very few tabs, minimalism is KEY.
Conclusion
To conclude this blog post I think I would like to reflect on the journey I took producing this site and the creative freedom I had throughout the project as a whole. Being able to create a website how I want to portray my brand and my products was really interesting to me, I think I have created a well working and good looking website that does its job. Of course there is always room for improvement, if I had a longer extension for this project I would have liked to look into building websites, tutorials and more, in order to get the full effect of a really professional website. On the other hand this is all of course a mock up, my products don't actually exist which is why I wasn't too disappointed with perhaps the lack of professionalism. given my current circumstances I was able to produce something that anyone could look at and realise a lot of effort and work has gone into it.
I am excited to see my new skills set after being faced with making my own shop website, it has made me put on a more 'business-like' mind set along with keeping my target audience front row of everything I produce.
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