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.

Mini-Project - Saltwater

For our first project back, we have two weeks to create and develop a website for a retail establishment, which includes restaurants, bars, shops, pawnbrokers and dry cleaners!

I decided to create a website for the bar/restaurant - Saltwater. I've been in quite a few times so I know the environment well, it's one of my favourite bars and I think I'll be able to do the company justice through their new web design.

Their current website is online at: http://www.saltwater-restaurant.com/
As you can see, it's very basic and uses a multitude of Flash and HTML/CSS. I currently don't like their website as the design of it covers the text in some cases and the colours don't contrast enough, making it hard to read and not very user friendly.

I've looked through their website and image gallery and have begun my research for the project. These are the two files I have so far. The logo I created (first image) takes into account their current logo, but for this project, I thought I'd replicate it and produce the website around it.

Trent Barton Review

Well well well! It's about time Trent Barton revamped their website!
Their old site was very outdated and was quite unfriendly to use, it felt as though it was stuck in the mid 00's with their simple drop down menus and confusing bus time tables, however the story is different now.

Their new site offers the user a modern soft design, with the use of sliding menus and databases to remove unwanted clutter. Their new features removed all the excessive and unrequired data, and presents the user with options to find what they're really looking for.

Diverse menus that are simple to use and easy to understand have turned this website around. Their graphics have been improved a sense of strong brand has been created through their graphic design and web management. Check it out!

10/10

http://www.trentbarton.co.uk/

Fluid or Fixed?

There's no doubt that creating a website in photoshop, sliceing it up and plonking it into a table is the easiest possible way to creating a website. However, in terms of accessibility this makes things more difficult.

My vision for the site is to be able to change text size, but I'm worried about the navigation at the top of the page. Originally I was going to use images as the links and then the image changes once you roll over to change the background colour.

To talk about these problems more and get a better understanding, I've arranged to talk to my brother who works in web design and uses CSS and HTML every day. Hopefully he'll be able guide on what would be best to do for my website.

At the moment, I'm using a fluid design which looks fixed. Once you resize the window, the whole website stays centred and the same size. I am unsure as to how to change this at the moment.