Website Essay

What was your market analysis and what is a description of your thought process in selecting this theme?

• For my website my market analysis was threefold. First and foremost my market was the current members of the Penn State Women’s Lacrosse Team. The site they had up before I put mine up was outdated and had not been updated in three years. I want the site to be a place where they are able to go to find out any information they need to about the team, which would include anything from practice times to announcements about games in the upcoming weekend.
• Secondly, I want the site to be available to anyone coming to Penn State that might be interested in joining the team. I wanted the site to give them a good idea what the program stands for and is all about. I know before coming to Penn State I was overwhelmed by all the possibilities of things that I could do when I got here. I want this site to be a place that those high school students can go to and hopefully get a feel for what the team is like. Also, if they are interested in the program the contacts of the officers is on the site so they can get a hold of them to ask them any further questions they may have.
• Lastly, I want this site to be available to any parents or fans of the Women’s team. This site is an easy way to access information about the team like the roster and the schedule.
• My thought process in doing this site was first thinking about my audience; players, prospective players, and fans. I just wanted this site to be something simple that would be easy to navigate and one would be able to access information quickly. Selecting a theme was not very difficult because this team represents Penn State so I wanted this website to reflect that. I wanted to represent an informational site and that is why I chose the Star theme. I liked having one menu bar and being able to navigate from any page to the menu and back. I kept the background and the font colors blue and white to represent Penn State. I wanted simplicity so I kept the same heading throughout and with each page you are able to navigate back to the home page.

What was your project timeline and what were your successes/failures in following it?

My original planned timeline was:

Project Breakdown

§  Project plan/timeline

o   3/27-Hand in website proposal

o   3/27- Find out how to access website and work with the one already assigned to club lax

§  Week of 4/1- Meet with club lax president and go over specifics about the site and get all information about the team I may need

o   3/31- Gather information

o   4/1- Sketch out pages for site

o   4/3- Begin to revamp homepage

o   4/5- Club game at Penn State; photograph for team shot, individual shot, and action shots for photo gallery and bios

§  Week of 4/7-begin basics for each of the ten pages

o   4/8- Create ten basic pages

o   4/9- Type all information up in word documents

o   4/10- Make sure everything links back to the home page

§  Week of 4/14-finish up and create detail within the site

o   4/15- Make sure all images are uploaded

o   4/17- Add the detailed information in

§  Week of 4/21- Complete the site and prepare for presentation

o   4/22- Website completed and handed in

• Of course I did not follow my timeline like I thought I would have. I first ran into problems when the girl’s only home game was cancelled so I was no longer able to take pictures. This is a club team and not a varsity sport, so there is not a ton of information to post on the site, so having ten different pages was a bit challenging! I was successful in the fact that I tried to work on the site a few days each week, but it didn’t always end up being the days that I had planned on. I was unsuccessful in the fact that uploading the site and figuring out all the kinks took much more time than I had initially anticipated on. It was frustrating knowing what I wanted to do with the site, but not being able to figure out how to do it.

What were the tools you used, resources you followed and assistance you received?

• The first thing I did before I started my website was to plan out on paper what my thoughts were on how I wanted to design my site. As with any design nothing ever goes according to plan. This was my first experience making a website so I did not have the capabilities to make anything very “high-tech”. I knew before beginning my website that simplicity was going to have to be the key.
• At first I started in Dreamweaver, but then moved to FrontPage. Almost every time I worked on the site I was in 7 Sparks, that way if I ran into problems, which I did about every time I worked on the site I was able to ask for assistance.  I also referenced material from class and used the book to try and work with the code if the design was not laying out right.
• I do not think that the Dreamweaver and FrontPage  are necessarily hard to work with, but I had so many issues with things, they were more frustrating than challenging. One of the big things is that no matter what program I used Internet explorer and another web browser like Safari would not show the same thing. I always happened to encounter weird spacing, beginners luck I guess!

What are your suggestions for site improvement?

• I want to keep working on this site; I just did not have enough time to work on it. First and foremost I want the site to be able to be seen and the same in any web browser. I also want to add a little more design aspect to it, so it is not so simplistic. I would like to add a bit more imagery to it. I eventually want to learn how to work flash and I would like to experiment with the site using flash. I like this as the base for the Women's Club Lax site, however I want to be able to expand of this and make the site more design orientated.

Why did you choose the colors and theme for the site that you did?

• As I have stated earlier I did not really think twice about selecting the blue and white for my site, I don’t think anything else would have really been fitting. I tried using turf grass as a background, but did not like how it looked, it was too much of a distraction. I really like how the white font looked on the blue background.
• As for the theme, I wanted the site to be simple and visually appealing. When I was looking at the sites for the varsity sports here at Penn State I kept thinking they were too busy. I do not think a site is very effective if you have to spend a minute looking for the link you want, it should take only a few seconds.

Evaluate your site. What would you do differently if you had more time or experience?

• Honestly, if I were to rate my site I would give it two different grades. I like the fact that it is easy to navigate and I think it is pretty visually appealing because the only thing to really look at is the information in front of you. The downside I see to my site is that even though everything looks totally fine in FrontPage sometimes all the buttons do not like to upload when you open the site, depending on the web browser. The other thing that I would really like to improve on is to add more design to the site; however I do not know how to do that. I would like to take some crash courses in better learning Dreamweaver and Flash! I am ad Advertising and Art and major and I think that internet design is taking over traditional media.
• Finally, another improvement I would add to the site is on the message board page I would add ad a forum set up where anyone would be able to add comments, post questions, etc.