Laura

What I learned in Content Management Week 2 – Marketing

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Feb 032012
 

This week in Content Management I learned all about marketing. I did a presentation on keyword research which I will do an extended blog about soon.

John gave a presentation on on-site SEO and gave good tips about where to place your keywords on your website.

Esam spoke about Google Adwords search engine advertising and how it works. He told us about the benefits of targeted advertising and how a better ROI (return on investment) is achieved. Adwords PPC (pay per click) advertising has a lot of benefits, because it gives a lot of control to the client, who can choose who they want to target and have a lot of control over how much they want to spend.

Other things I learned about were:

Off-site SEO – this refers to inbound links to your website and how they influence search engines. Links to your site from authoritative websites in a related industry are like a thumbs up to the search engine that your site is good. The most valuable types of links are one-way, unprompted, unpaid-for links. Quality over quantity.

Google Places – this is another free way to market your business and one that should be utilised.

Article marketing/Guest blogging – this is a way of getting a link back to your website,by writing an article or guest blogging for another website.

 

 

 Posted by Laura at 4:52 pm

What I learned in Content Management Week 1 – Content Strategy

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Jan 262012
 

This week we had some really interesting presentations from class members on various aspects of content strategy.

Richard spoke about User Generated Content. I learned that there can be different levels of engagement I also learned about some of the opportunities, threats and legal issues of UGC. UGC can be great for increasing the amount of content produced on your website, but it can be difficult to monitor.

Nicola spoke about websites having personality and a tone of voice, and how this can be incorporated in every aspect of a website; from the use of aesthetics, the style of writing, the types of content, and how these all combine. Some of the benefits include setting yourself apart from competition, and building trust and relationships with the users. I learned about how a style is constructed, and what goes into a stye guide, which is something that can be created for reference, for consistency.

Alison told us about writing for the web. She gave us tips on hooking the user, and how to keep them on the site with crisp succinct copy. It is important to know your audience, and to create meaningful copy, with highlighted heading and keywords to grab their attention. A pyramid style of writing works well. Copy should be pruned aggressively – the shorter, the plainer, the better.

In Jame’s lecture, I learned that content should be Useful, Unique and Authoritative. He told us about the various types of content we could include and the best practice in producing each of them.

Some of the most important things I took away from the class were:

  1. Know your audience!
  2. Understand your own goals AND understand your users goals.
  3. Don’t neglect accessibility when using alternative types of content.

 

 Posted by Laura at 10:42 pm

Grids essay

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Jan 262012
 

See here

 Posted by Laura at 6:24 pm

Sneak peek

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Dec 042011
 

I’m having lots of fun in illustrator for this film project, but I’m soooo slow. Really hope I manage to get it all done by Wednesday!

 

 

 Posted by Laura at 12:12 am

Small Business Project – Warm Bean Coffee

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Nov 222011
 

So I didn’t show a lot last week so I may talk you through my process a bit more.

I’d never designed a logo before and didn’t really know how to go about it due to my serious lack of imagination. I wanted a retro emblem logo so I googled for that and found this tutorial to learn some basics and then changed it about a bit to come up with what (I later realised) is essentially a knockoff of the Starbucks logo. Fantastic. You can see it in one of my earlier blog posts.

After a false start on one website, I went back to the beginning and started with some better planning. I gathered all my content and sketched out a general plan of what was going to go on each page, and did a bit of wireframing. I won’t subject you to most of my notes as they are mainly scribbles. This page looked neat enough to share.

I got into Photoshop and attempted for the first time to design using grid. It is also the first time I’ve ever begun anything in Photoshop, and not just dived straight into the code. I began with a 960px 12 column grid photoshop action which I downloaded from the 960.gs website. I split it into two columns for most pages, and three columns of equal width for the menu page, with 20px gutters in between. I think I have been converted into a lover of grids and find myself wondering if I’ll ever go without them again?? However, David did point out that my pages do feel a little tight, so next time I may consider widening the gutters.

I tried a lot of different colour combinations before settling on black, red and white, and even then it took me a long time to decide on the shades of red to use! These colours seemed to work best for the brand I had in mind for the coffee shop. I decided to keep the texture in the background quite dark and subtle so as not to distract from the content, and to contrast well with the white font.

For the typography I tried lots of different typefaces, and eventually found Nixie One in Google Webfonts, which I used for the headings (although I’m still looking for something better), and I stuck with Verdana for the body text.

The colour scheme and typography were probably what I struggled with the most. I went through about 100 variations of each and spent hours changing the margins and lineheights. Hopefully these things will become easier with practice as I learn what looks good and what doesn’t through trial and error.

All in all I feel like I have learned a lot through the duration of this project. Anyway, here is a link to the finished website:

www.laurahampson.com/warm-bean

 

 

 Posted by Laura at 11:22 pm

Warm Bean Mockups

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Nov 162011
 

These are some photoshop mockups for the coffee website. The first was the original direction in which I was heading, with neutral browns and creams and latte colours. This was just a very basic idea for the layout before I put in the content because I scrapped it pretty quickly because I thought it was a bit naff.

All of the content for the website, I have taken from Third Floor Espresso (my favourite coffee shop in Dublin), and after looking through all of the photos that I stole from their facebook, I thought I needed something a little more bright and fun. A lot of their photos have red in them due to the red coffee bags and filters, so I thought I’d go for red, black and white. I thought red would work because it is a bold, strong, warm colour, words which are all synonymous with good coffee. 

I liked the wood grain background and decided to stick with it, but in a very dark colour to keep it subtle. There is a lot of woodgrain in the photos.

 Posted by Laura at 12:46 am

Warm Bean Logo

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Nov 112011
 

 Posted by Laura at 5:38 pm

Things I learned – Week 6

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Nov 052011
 

In Research and Critical Analysis this week, I learned about systematic and action research.

Action Research is the sort of research we will be undertaking for our thesis projects. This can also be referred to as practioner-based research, or self-reflective practice. It involves a repetitive cycle of planning, acting, observing and reflecting.

In our web design class I learned about typography. There are a lot of things to consider when using a typeface on a website including:

  • size and colour
  • line height
  • letter and word spacing
  • general layout, whitespace and hierarchies
I also learned about
  • accessibility issues in typography for the web
  • typographic units
  • all of the CSS typographic properties
  • Differences in fonts designed for print and screen
  • web fonts
  • image replacement for accessibility
 Posted by Laura at 11:39 pm

Colour Schemes in Web Design

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Nov 012011
 

3 websites with good colour schemes:

www.cakesweetcake.co.uk - This website uses shades of peach and teal as the main colours. These are complimentary colours and work together very well. There are also some shades of brown and beige, which are warm neutral colours, that bring a feeling of wholesomeness to the design. All of the colours together could be described as an earthy palette, which is good for a bakery, because you want the user to think of natural ingredients and freshly baked goods.

qlpros.com - This website uses four main colours, charcoal grey, light grey, white and yellow. These colours look great together and the site gives great visual impact. The white text on the dark grey background, and the dark grey text on the yellow background are both high contrast, making the site very readable. Shades of light yellow are calming and cheerful. The charcoal grey contrasts give the website a level of professionalism.

stuntbox.com  - This is good because it is black and white and very clean. The link hover state brings a pop of red which works well in keeping the site visually interesting.

 

3 websites with poor colour schemes:

www.abercrombie.co.uk - Abercrombie and Fitch made their website just like their stores ie. really hard to see. They used a colour scheme of grey on grey on grey. There are many parts of the website where there is not nearly enough contrast between the text an background, especially in the footer. They also used grey as a background colour for the products which I think was a big mistake as the products should pop visually.

Multiple shades of grey apparently give a sophisticated, modern feel to a website, but personally I do not think it’s worth sacrificing usability.

www.videosoniclab.com - This website has too many colours, it is very loud despite having a black background, the colours are too bright, it hurts the eyes. I don’t know where to look.

www.rzent.co.nr – This website is just plain ugly, with too many colours trying to grab the focus of the user. The yellow text on red is a bit over the top, and the blue text on the red background is completely unreadable.

References:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-designers-part-1-the-meaning-of-color/

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Jason Beird

 Posted by Laura at 10:37 pm

Things I learned – Week 5

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Nov 012011
 

The Applied Art class and Web Design class were closely related last week, in that we spoke a lot about images for the web in both. Some of the things I learned include:

  • How to create seamless patterns in Photoshop using the offset filter.
  • How to optimise images for the web and which is the best file format to use for different kinds of images.
Things I learned from looking at the previous weeks homework were:
  • Don’t use unnecessary div tags. Lists, headings and other block level elements can all be styled in the same manner as divs.
  • display: block

    This can make in inline element act like a block level element.

  • clear: both

    This can solve stacking problems when floating elements.

  • Pragmatism always trumps semantics.
 Posted by Laura at 5:33 pm
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