Website 2 - Logo

This post should have been made by Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Looking at the sites logofavs.com and logopond.com helped our group decided what features we want included in our logo.

The logo for our website was created to be easily recognizable and understandable at first glance. Our client is a home builder and also does all kinds of wood workings and remodels. We designed our logo with the letters "NC" that stand for "Noe's Construction".The "N" has elements at each ends that give it a look of columns to further place the idea of construction/home improvement in the reader's mind. These letters are set inside a shape that resembles a home, complete with a roof and a floor. All of these aspects of our logo contribute to the idea of construction and craftsmanship. We used the same color scheme for the logo as our client's company's colors (burgandy, cream, and black). Our logo has since been apporved by our clients after removing the word "homes". They didn't want to be pigeonholed into the idea of just home construction.

Website 2 - Goals

This post should have been made by Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The proposal for our group web site was effectively edited and was approved. Now that our proposal is approved, we have to meet our proposed goals. Our group has successfully come up with a website template that includes a menu bar, logo, and title on each page. Each page also has space for pictures and text. Our attempts at creating a working drop down menu are continuing to fail but we are learning a lot in the process. Good news is that our web pages are becoming more and more developed. We have decided on the font: Thin lines and curves, which will be unique to our website. Our logo has been successfully created and edited to our clients liking by Mellissa. We are continuing to work outside of class and are planning on setting aside several hours in which we can get a lot of work completed without interruption. We have a lot of goals that we need to meet but we are confident that we will be able to accomplish them.

Repetition

This post should have been made by Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Repetition in website design is very important. Things such as menu items, fonts, colors, and general layout should be repeated on each web page to make navigation easier. By using reoccurring elements in your design you create a more visually appealing and better working website. Repetition should be done in a clean and simplistic manner in order to not overwhelm the reader.

When I designed my first website I used these principles a lot. I had a repetitive layout of each page and had the same top menu bar/title on each page. These things made my web page easy to navigate between pages and easy to find content on each page such as pictures and textual content. I believe that repetition is very useful for your audience in that it makes websites uniform and navigable.

Website 2 - Color Techniques

The use of color for our group website will be important for drawing attention to certain items on a web page. We plan on using a lot of photos to showcase the work of our client. In order to have these stand out we will have to utilize certain techniques with color.

Primary colors are any colors that you can't create. They include yellow, red, and blue. They are spaced evenly around the color wheel.
Secondary colors are colors that are created by mixing equal amounts of two primary colors. These colors are located between the primary colors on the color wheel.
Tertiary colors are colors created by mixing secondary colors. They are located in between the secondary colors on the color wheel.

Warm colors are colors that contain red or yellow and come to the front of a document. They are good for drawing attention to a certain part of a page.
Cool colors are colors that contain blue and recede to the background. Cool colors sometimes must be used to create a contrast.

RGB (Red,Green,Blue) colors are used for computer monitors, TVs, and other digital displays.
CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) colors are used for print documents.

For our website project we will be using a fairly simple color scheme. We chose to use a shade of red for accent and a shade of orange/yellow for the back ground. We anticipate to draw off some colors from the photographs once they are uploaded. The photographs will contain a lot of orange, yellow, and red shades and tints coming from wood work that is either stained or not. Looking at the color wheel we see that orange, yellow, and red are analogous colors. So in order to not take the eye away from the photos we will use an analogous color for accents (deep red), and a fairly neutral color (cream color) for the background.

The photos should contain enough warm colors to accent themselves and if they will have a border or not is still yet to be determined by the group.

Our website needs to be easy to navigate and needs to draw attention to the photographs on the screen. We will use more and more color techniques as the website is developed, but all in all we plan on keeping it relatively simple and clean.

Website 2 - Storyboard/Progress

For Website-2 my group and I will be revising my previous Website-1. We will be adding more pages and design techniques to make the website more professional and effective. Our group will mainly colaborate on the website. This will allow us to express our ideas during each step of the project. However, we have assigned certain rules to group members. I will be incharge of keeping up contact with our client and discussing with them changes they think would be beneficial. Melissa put together a great logo design so she will be incharge of finishing the design. Alex took our ideas and notes, and created the storyboard which can be seen below. Besides these small things, the rest will be colaborated on. We all want to have equal input on the website so that we can all be satisfied with the results. Any deadlines we set are discussed in class and are treated more like benchmarks. We have a lot of time to work on this project so we will create a basic template of the website early, then get specific on details.

If I had more time to improve upon my first Website project I would first make sure that my page followed better alignment principles. I tried for a long time to get my columns to be the same width but could not figure it out. Had I had more time in class to work and ask question I believe I could have solved this problem. Another issue I had was with content. More time would have allowed me to perfect the written content instead of just putting things down that didn't necessarily have any bearing or importance to the website. I also should have included more content that helped educate the audience on the processes and prices of the company. After we went over different text types in class, I realized that my title/logo was not designed well. The script text that I used can make things hard  to read especially with "LLC". I struggled with figuring out how to work the program. I felt like once I made a template for one page it made it easier to just reuse that page repeatedly.

Program to create my Website

To create my website, I will use the MS Expressions program because it is free to purchase as a Tech student and it will be easier than using notepad to code HTML.