KIACS Online - New Design

Here is the latest design for my website.

If you compare the new design with the current design, it's clear to see how much my design ideas and quality of design as developed in just under a year.

Originally, my logo had 4 different colours and the font wasn't very modern looking. I've decided to stay with the layout of the logo (the words under each other) but I've decided to use a clear, funky font and just the green because it looks more slick, more fun and less rough.

The logo on the far right is my official logo, the arrow with a blue circle underneath, reflects the cycle of design, development and deliverance. By crossing it over with an arrow, this connotates a different "direction" in my work, and reflects my approach to design being clear, simple and effective.

I've continued to use the green and blue as the main colours for the website, dropping the red and white as these offered too much variation and detracted from the website development as I was trying to work with too many colours.

In terms of content, the website will house my graphic and website design work I've created over the last 2 or 3 years. Not only will there be a portfolio section with live previews of my work, but the blog will serve the purpose that this blog currently does. This will all be backed up by my twitter page, where users will be able to access my latest tweets, straight into the website.

I will be using HTML, CSS, PHP, MySql and probably (hopefully) jQuery where I can.

Overall, this new website design is sleek, modern, clean and effective. It will serve its purpose to a great standard and will be a design I am happy to keep for years to come hopefully.

Social Network Integration

There's no getting away from social networks when you're online now. Even the most standard sites such as the BBC are all over social networks like a house on fire.

Why is this?

Well it's all about free promotion and creating a presence when you're online. By various websites being connected to a social network, they're instantly accessible to a world of over 50 Million users (Facebook) and a growing Tweety generation through Twitter. With almost the equivelant of the entire UK population online through Facebook across the world, there's a massive potential to gain access to an endless array of people from all sorts of backgrounds, enableing advertisers to target specific groups and get maximum benefits.

As more and more users post up their details to Facebook to share with their "friends", advertisers are now able to pick out specific infomation and change their displayed adverts according to your preferences. For example, if you're single, you'll gain many adverts for dating agencies, if you're itnerested in fish, you may get scooba diveing ads.

My current project is to create and produce a website for my friend Lucy. As I was never able to finish the site I began for her, I will now use this project to complete it for her, including links to social networks. But which social network is best to use?

Well Lucy already had a facebook and Myspace so it would make sense to utilise these. However, Myspace doesn't really make it very easy to post that content on other pages in the same way you can run your RSS Tweets from Twitter across multiple platforms. Therefore, I'm going to try and steer clear of Myspace due to it's inaccessibility. However, I will use Myspace's idea of being able to broadcast music to your listeners. I'll be creating a mini music device in flash for Lucy to show off her work.

To keep her site up-to-date and relevent, I would like to create a blog feature, but I am unsure as to how I'll do this as of yet. Instead, I will deffinatley try to incorporate her facebook updates and twitter feed as this will keep users up to date, even if the website isn't kept on top of.

By utilising the social network industry, I'll be able to keep Lucy's fan on top of what's happening as they'll have easy access to her reguarly updated sites. This will keep her fans interested and continue their support and come see her when she's off to do a gig.

Displaying her updates directly onto the front page is important as it's current and instant, however I will not be making it a massive element, due to the temptation from users to click off her site and visit Facebook, rather than exploring her website.