Learning Journal 7- Website Planning and Design

In this module I not only learned about website planning and design, but also to ask relevant questions such as what is my target audience and what is the goal of my site? As simple as these questions are, they really helped to take the generality out of the idea that I had the website that I am designing.

Answers to the Questions Above:

• Who is my target audience? 
• Students and Educators in the Design I course at Niagara County Community College
• What is the goal of my website? 
• To be a resource for students and instructors to reference when studying or teaching the Elements and Principles of Design.

Those two questions really informed the entire process of my design. They kept me from adding unnecessary content and guided the level of detail that I included.

Below are other important concepts that I learned and applied in order to design a website about the "Elements and Principles of Design."

Storyboard your site

I sketched out rough ideas of what I wanted my landing page to look like and then chose one sketch to be the template for the entire site. 

Color should add to the site as an additional design element rather than being an after thought.

I chose an image that created a mood or had a color palette that I liked and then selected the main colors within it for my palette. I found the RGB and Hex color codes using an image editor.

Have a fast loading site
I resized all images in my website using Web Resizer. This service reduced my image sizes by 50-60 percent which a meant faster load time for visitors. Below is an example of an image that I used in my site and how Web Resizer decreased its size by 77%.

People scan sites in either an F or Z pattern. 
The article from the Neilsen Norman Group describes this. 
Based on this, I designed my website to have the most important information across those F-shaped "eye lines."

I placed the name of the site first (to orient the reader as to what the main idea of the website is), then the navigation (for the reader to go straight to what they need), and then the text (should the reader want to know about the site) and then the images (which support the content on the site). I arranged things in decreasing order of importance based on the F-Pattern.

Consistent NavigationI learned that consistency in navigation makes for a better user experience. If people know where they are going and how to get there, they are likely to stay on the site and gain from it.I applied this to my site by: -Putting my navigation along the top-Creating a dropdown menu so that all site links are in one place-Making the placement of my navigation identical on all pages.

                                                                                        

ParticipationI participated in this course by reviewing the lecture and using it to guide my process, following the links to the cyber lessons and using the content within them to inform the assignment. I enjoyed this module and put great effort in using the resources to create a worthwhile final project. I also participated in giving feedback to others concerning their projects.Terminology:Storyboard - A sequence of drawings typically with some reflections and dialogue, representing the shots planned for a movie or television presentationSitemap - A list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. It can be a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design.F pattern - An "F" shape that reflects the appearance of a heat map created when eye tracking tools track the directions of eye movement when people are viewing a blog or text heavy site.Target audience - A particular group at which a film, book, advertising campaign etc is aimed at.