Website Evaluation
The kind of website I wanted to create was related to video games, specifically to accompany my youtube channel 'DmdGamer'. I chose this topic as it was something I was interested in and would enjoy doing. The tools I intended to use where Coda 2 to write the HTML & CSS, Adobe PhotoShop to create any graphics for the website and MAMP to host a local server during the building of the website. Before beginning my website, I looked at a number of similar sites to see what kind of content they used and that I might want to incorporate into my design. This was helpful as it gave me more ideas of the kind of things I wanted on the website. I decided on the URL www.dmdgamer.com as DmdGamer is my name on youtube so it is consistent. When planning my website I needed to consider W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) guidelines. I had an idea of the content I wanted to include on my website, this included a videos page to post my latest videos, blog and an about me page. Having an idea of what I wanted to include in the website made the process of planning much easier and enabled me to create a better website.
For the layout and structure of my website I
decided to go for a fixed width layout as I had seen it used on a
number of other websites and I thought it looked good. I placed the
main navigation on the top of the page and had it visible throughout the
site to make navigation easier. I decided against using drop down menus
as they tend to clutter up the screen when using the navigation which
was something I didn't want to use. I went for short simple page names so as not to clutter the links area of the page and maintain usability. There where a few other basic rules I decided on for the navigation such as having new pages open in the same window with the navigation on the top to so users know where they are in the site.
For the homepage I had a large featured image under the navigation bar
In my original design I wanted to incorporate an animated feature banner on my homepage. This would have a number of images of featured content which would change automatically
One feature of my website that I feel was particularly successful was the large featured images used on the homepage.