Getting The Audience Involved In My Website…

In a previous post I have discussed how we planned to get the audience involved with our programme. We wanted them to send us in videos of themselves performing magic tricks, and if we had a good enough turn out, we would use these videos for the countdown on the show. Unfortunately although I posted on endless amounts of magic forums and websites, we didn’t get a response. However a number of our crew members (including myself), sent in our videos, hopefully to get the ball rolling. By the time serious rehearsals had started for the show, we hadn’t got a response, therefore we used video clips found on Youtube and featured them in our show.

However as the time grew closer, all my endless forum posting had payed off! We received a tweet from a young magician called “Steve Bishop” aka “The Magic SB” who sent us one on his magic tricks, I then messaged him asking for permition to feature his videos on our websites and he graciously said yes. Therefore although all our efforts didn’t make a great turnout, we still had outside audience participation!!

This is when I started creating the Get Involved & Videos section of my website.

Ill discuss the Get Involved Part of the website first. The reason I am discussing this part first is because initially the “Get Involved” page and the “Videos” page were the same page.

Above is my original “Get Involved” page which features both details of how to get involved and examples of other videos sent to us. At first I thought this page was great, however as the rest of my site progressed I felt that the audience interactivity information should be more in depth and should have more focus.

Therefore I separated the pages and created the “Get Involved” section, which would primarily be the main focus for our audience participation, as it would have all the details of how to get involved with the show.

I am really proud of this page as it does everything it needs to, its informative, its magical and it fills all the space on the page. Once again the twitter feed widget features, although some people may think using this widget on more than one page is a bit too much, I just felt like it was a key element to our show and a great visual to get our audience motivated.

This then takes me on to the new page, the “Videos” section. I found that the way the videos had featured on the original idea felt lazy, unattractive and amateur. Therefore I had a look at the Wix features and found a “Video Playlist” option, which allowed the page to feature a number of videos in an organized and constructed manner. It may look like a simple page, but in fact it was probably the hardest page to construct.

The reason for this was that all the files had to be on Youtube, and seeing as all the content was spread across various peoples Youtube channels, it made them very hard to locate on the search feature on Wix.

Therefore I took it upon myself to acquire all the videos from various people’s channels and upload them onto one “MagicNetTV” channel.  Sorting this channel out too around a day to do, but it allowed all of our group members to easily access the videos for their websites.

Overall I think the changes that I have made to these pages make a massive difference to the flow of the website, hopefully so the audience have a clear indication of what information they can take from where.

Creating The Homepage…

After planning out what my homepage would look like I decided this would be the most important step in creation. Therefore following the plan I began to create the page. Now ive created my homepage I feel more at ease because this will now be the basic template for all my other pages.

By this I mean the background, which I am going to use. I decided to use this background because its simple but yet elegant and it fits into the theme of my page well. However there Is not black in the background image im using, so I have decided to turn the area around the page black. This is because it fits in well with the colour scheme, but also makes the rest of the page stand out and look quite professional. Initially the border was white but I asked a couple of peers what they thought of it and the majority of them told me to change it to black. I think this is because the white seemed out of place, but also because my text was white it just looked a little too much.

Annoyingly when creating my website I forgot to screen capture pages that I changed to show on my blog the difference between the two designs. So I will just have to discuss it.

Below is an image of my finished homepage. As you can see the I have used a countdown timer on my site, which before we had filmed our show, was counting down the days until the show aired. The reason I haven’t removed this is because I feel that it would be a great addition for future episodes, so that our audience know how long they have to wait until another exiting edition of MagicNetTV will be aired. Below this is a Twitter widget which allows the viewers to see all of the shows recent Tweets acting as a “News” element on the page. I think this is a really good widget to use and it doesn’t just allow the audience to straight away be involved with the interactive part of our show, but it also fills them in on what’s been going on infront and behind the camera.

To the left of this is a slideshow of a large number of pictures taken during the shows rehearsals. The reason I decided to make this so dominant on the homepage is because “a picture says a thousand words”, therefore the audience will have a sense of involvement when they see who and what makes up the show. The key photo in this slideshow though is the Logo, it is the first photo, which is seen and is used repetitively throughout the slideshow. The logo is a very important visual for the viewers to see first, because they will then associate the logo with the website and the programme, which gives it a sense of BRANDING.

Below all these elements are three boxes which provide links to other sections of the website. Although I have more pages on the website than these three boxes, there are always specific sections which are more prominent on other television programme websites such as the One Show and This Morning. As you can see by the picture, there are two pages, which are highlighted on the homepage, to provide the viewer with easy navigation to the pages they are most likely going to want to view. Also you may notice by the screen grab, that this Mornings Twitter feed is also on the homepage now. When I first planned my homepage, This morning did not feature their feed on the homepage, however it is quite a prominent edition to the page, so im glad I have incorporate our twitter feed in my homepage.

At the very bottom of my website you will see the “Contact Us” link. Initially I wanted this at the top of my page with all the other navigation buttons, but due to space constrictions I have had to put it at the bottom. Although I was slightly annoyed at this at first, I have noticed that many websites put this link on the bottom of their webpages, and actually a lot of people associate this page to be located at the bottom of most homepages. So in retrospect I don’t mind this being at the bottom so much.

The element that is the most different from my initial homepage layout is the Twitter Feed. This is because before, instead of the feed there was text telling the audience what’s going to be coming up on the show (similar to the one on the This Morning page). The main reason I decided to change it was because it was leaving me with a lot of empty space and one thing that I had noticed when looking at other sites is that there is never empty space on a website. This is because it just looks amateur and unprofessional.

Overall I am really happy with my finished homepage and I will make a conscious effort in my other pages to not leave empty space and to follow the same design theme.

Planning My Website…

After doing research into existing magazine programmes websites. I then began to think about what I wanted to include in my website.

The key element I wanted to include, was to carry the theme over from the TV show to the site, so the audience can identify that they are both related because of the branding.

But first I needed to decide what I was going to include in the site, so I could start colleting videos and photographs from our TV sessions to make up these pages.

Therefore I drew up a type of map, similar to a mind map that would not just help me know what I am going to include, but also helps me know what pages need to be linked up to what.

 This is the map that I drew up and as you can see, at the moment, I plan to have seven main pages with numerous sub pages. Although it is a very simple map it allows me to know what kinds of things I can include on these different pages.

Going back to the theme of the site, I have tried to draw up a sketch of what my homepage will look like. Personally I think that this sketch is the most important bit of planning I can produce. This is because, once I have a template for my site (i.e. a background image, the Logo/Slogan, font type), this will then be used as a base for all the other pages on the site, adding continuity.

I think researching existing sites really helped me to realise this, as websites such as “This Morning” have the same layout and branding throughout all of their pages, so this is defiantly one element I should produce on my website as well.

 

Once I had sketched a rough design of the layout of the homepage, I sketched up a more detailed design of my homepage, which would help me identify my colourings, positioning’s and content. However the only thing I could not show on the design is what colour I plan to have my font, which will be white. Once I actually create the page, I believe that I may have to slightly reposition some of my elements. One thing I didn’t show on my design is what element would be links. One thing I do really want to do, is to make sure that navigating my site is just as easy as navigating a professional website. Therefore I plan that 80% of my homepages content will be linked to the relevant pages.

 

Overall I am happy with the way I have begun to plan my site, however I do feel that with something like a website, it is better to experiment with different layouts and content while producing the pages. Therefore I  am not going to go in  too much more depth with planning pages, as I feel that I may then restrict myself to be more creative during the production process. The main thing I have accomplished with planning out my homepage is the template for all of my other pages, which I believe is key!