Media Website Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My Media product which for me would be my main website, which develops/challenge forms and conventions of other charity websites.

My website has similar conventions to the average charity website such as how they display there information.

The site that I chose to make with my partner was about helping young people who had been diagnosed with ADHD and after looking at other charity sites such as Scope I found that my website and scopes shared similar characteristics such as having the same layout of sorts with the typical masthead with the logo at on the left side, then having a bar of links below.

The website that I designed is aimed at the young people and that is why the design is very simple and spread out, the pictures emphasise this as all of them I think have teenagers in them whether it's about their dealings with ADHD or just a picture to tug at the heart strings of people for donations.

The pictures in my main website were all taken either by my partner or me and after we got all of them we edited them in iWeb/Photoshop, having these pictures made our site our own as we have designed it from scratch.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

My charity website is on ADHD and this alone singles out some social groups as if you have ADHD you are most likely to be male although our website is aimed to both genders however it is more likely that a male will be visiting our site. ADHD is best treated when you’re young as it is harder to deal with when older in specific cases therefore our site is very child friendly and it is aimed at helping children/teenagers.

We’ve achieved this on our website is that all of the photos are of teenagers with short stories about them so fellow teenagers/children who visit the site can relate to them. The site contains some of the basic information you need to know about ADHD and this is for the youngsters who might of found out they have ADHD and they don’t know what to make of it.

Then there is more advanced info about ADHD and this is for a more mature audience maybe young adults or parents and that’s why our website is appealing to both Children and parents.

I also added some features that would specifically appeal to the teenage/child audience, these features are basically the most popular social networking sites such as twitter, facebook, youtube and myspace which if the teenager wanted to could spread this site about.

What kind of media institution might distribute my media product and why?

There would be many media institutions that could distribute my charity site from the smaller web servers which include SKY and AOL which could distribute my website easily or one of the powerhouses like Bauer media which is one of the largest media conglomerates however there strong points lie in magazines and radio and it is much easier to to promote my site on other websites such as the links I have put on the website such as youtube, twitter, myspace and facebook these sites are a great way to get your site out to the people as millions and millions of people use them and once something is supported by anyone well known or has many followers it can go viral and this can really help to the growth of our site.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

Firstly to find this out for my website I looked at the survey bit by bit and it showed me what general age would be visiting my site.

It showed that the majority of people would be visiting my site would be around the age of 17-20 then 40 plus

Although I think that there would be a younger audience as well but unfortunately we didn’t put a 12-16 option in the tick box,.

The general gender of our website visitors didn’t really need a survey to work out as I’ve said before ADHD is generally a male symptom and rarely occurs in women and the survey results back this up as it shows more than 20 of the visitors would be male and the rest would be females.

Even then I think that the females who would be visiting our site would be mothers that are looking up this info about their children if they have been just diagnosed with it.

 How did you attract/address your audience?

My Charity main website attracted the audience in by the video and the home page which showed a teenager getting talked too about ADHD and hopefully this would relate to the viewer.

I also think in my opinion that our website is very neat/simple and not cluttered which attracts the audience in as no one would want to go on a messy site.

There are also the pictures of teenagers living with ADHD and there are stories next to them so I think this attracts the younger audience in as hopefully they can relate to the stories (an example of is that instead of craving attention Connor put his energy and effort into playing a guitar)

Our sites colour scheme, I think is very simple and calming there are only 4 main colours and those were black blue white and grey. The blue and white being the main two colours, these two I think are calming as blue and white is basically the cloud and the sky.

Our site is also very consistent keeping the bar, logo and mast head on every page and there is usually a picture on every page to keep the readers attention if he has ADHD as one of the symptoms of this is that people with ADHD will loose attention quickly, having pictures and short paragraphs on each page will keep things fresh.

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product? & Looking back at your preliminary site what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

During this course I’ve learnt a lot, at the start for my school website I didn’t even know how to put a box around text or to colour in boxes or to shade in colours etc.

Now I know how to use various websites that help design my overall website such as Photoshop which I used to make my logo and Final Cut Express to edit the video for my main website.

By the end of making my preliminary site I was able to make a genuine charity site with all the conventional features a charity site would have and looking back all the programs that I used for the first website helped me achieve this as I was working out how to put HTML snippets in for goggle search bars and boxes which you could type in to sign in.

As well as making images and words links to other pages of my website.

By the end of the preliminary site I had a better understanding of Photoshop and this allowed me to make a logo completely from scratch.

The layout of my main website compared to the first one site I designed has many differences and you can see how much I improved as in the first website I had few working links and the colour scheme and layout wasn’t really up to scratch especially comparing it to my main website which got the colour scheme perfect in my opinion and the layout was spread out but it worked well as the colours made it  look just very mellow and calm.