"A professional-level software program product of Adobe Systems, Inc. (formerly of Macromedia) for use in designing, building and maintaining Internet websites." - writerswebsiteplanner.com
However, before I was able to begin the practical part of creating my website, I had to decide which two pages of a website that I wished to create. To help me understand other local newspaper websites, I decided to look and analyse a few. As shown below:
The Southend Times
I liked the use of their logo at the top of the page, I think that by using this, it attracts a lot of attention to exactly what the website is all about. I think the use of the side navigation bar, is a little out of the way, and perhaps has too many links for a local newspaper, which makes it far to complicated. I think a simpler navigation bar would be more appropriate. I think that the white background works very well, as it is not distracting and also makes reading very easy, which is very important for a local newspaper website. I think it has an overall clean look, however it does appear quite amateur due to the lack of a particular universal theme to hold it all together, such as a colour or font.
Liverpool Echo
I think that this homepage is slightly too cluttered. It caused the eye to dart around the page frantically, attempting to settle on everything, which makes it overall very hard to read, which is the main basis of a local newspaper website. However, I do like the navigation bar, being much more simple, and better situated below the masthead, which makes it easy to find and also attracts enough attention to it, without taking away from the main body of the page. The use of pictures helps the page look full, however, I think less pictures would be better, so not to look too cluttered.
After taking away this information from both sites, I decided to design a few possibilities for my own website homepage. My designs are shown below:
Website Homepage Layout One:
I think this layout is very straight forward and easy to understand, as it is very vertical, much like a newspaper. However, by putting the navigation bar to the side, it takes up a lot of space which could be used for better content.
I think this layout is much more appropriate for the local newspaper, as it is set out very clearly and leaves a lot of space for main content, which is the basis of the website, and therefore needs a lot of space.
So I chose to use layout two.
After this I decided to use some unused article ideas that I hadn't used from my newspaper task, and use them on the website, which gave me a chance to use new images.
After doing all the planning, I finally decided to start practically making the website using dreamweaver. To do this I used a series of images that I firstly made in photoshop and imported them into dreamweaver to place them where I wanted.
These were the images I created:
Masthead:
Banner:
Main Content:
I then created both the navigation bar and the strapline, on dreamweaver, using text matching the theme of the rest of the website.
This is the final result of the Homepage:
After completing my homepage, I decided to create an About Us page which would include a contact us section, which I think would be very conventional and helpful on a local newspaper website. I decided that I wanted to keep with the same theme as the first page, to make it very clear and direct. So once again I created the images in photoshop, and this is the finished result:
This is my completed website, with two working links.
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