Wednesday 29 February 2012

Analysing Websites

The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror website has slightly different style to other newspaper websites such as “The Guardian “because it uses much more colours. For example it uses a red & white colour scheme quite a lot which enables is perfect for a news website because the part of the websites which you are immediately lured at is the images and the subheadings displayed in red. The images also have a major role in website because they stick out from the background. The type of font which is used consistently in the website is Arial which is very much a neutral font. The website also consists of quite a lot of adverts throughout the homepage which link to “insurance websites” which suggests that this website is targeted at an adult audience who is probably “Working/middle class” people. On this website when you go to the sport page the colour scheme dramatically changes to a green theme. The sport page has videos and links to social networking sites such as twitter where you can follow their sport journalists.

The type of language on the website is very much formal English and rarely uses slang English. This also emphasises on the websites target audience which is working class adults.  The website’s homepage doesn’t focus on a text as its primary selling point but instead it uses images. The website also has a “Fun & Games” section where you basically play games such as crosswords and bingo. These games are interactive with the chances to win money. They implemented these games into the website as they thought they would prove popular with their target audience. These games wouldn’t likely prove popular with a younger audience. The subheadings located on the homepage have links such as Finance and Sport which are in a green a blue font while links such as Celebs & lifestyle are in the colour pink which is likely to be popular to a female audience which is why the subheading are coloured in pink. The site is very much in raw HTML and doesn’t include lots of fancy effects which is another factor the website designer considered because having a website as raw HTML basically means that it has a very low bandwidth. This means that the website can be viewed very easily and quickly on portable devices such as I-phones.

SocialVibe

The “SocialVibe” site is a website in which you support a charity and earn money for that charity by completing various activities for brands for example completing surveys or “like” the brand on Facebook. The interface of this isn’t very packed and only consists of a slideshow banner and a forum. It also has links to social networking sites such as Facebook. I would say that the website is mostly aimed at young adults as the colour scheme is quite dark but also includes vibrant images.        

The implementation of interactive activities also suggests it’s targeted at young people because a younger audience would like interactive, fun things to do. This website is quite a bandwidth heavy website so it’s targeted at people who live in developed countries such as America and the UK and not targeted at people who live in poor counties. This is typical for a charity websites because they know that the people who would likely donate money would be people with lots money and not people who live in poor countries.   

Analysing my own Website

I designed my website with my target audience in mind. Before I created the website I conducted research into other movie websites which are the same genre. Some of the key features which stood out were the dark colour scheme of all the websites and the dynamic effects such as flashes. I implemented similar features into my website as this would result in it appealing to its target audience more. The audience which the “Scream” movies appeal to is mostly a teen audience so implementing dynamic effects would make it look exciting. The colour scheme which I used in my website is red, black and white which is matching with the colour of the text. This colour scheme wouldn’t appeal to other audiences such as children because it may appear quite scary, the dynamic effects wouldn’t appeal to older audiences and they would likely be drawn away from the site.

A disadvantages of my website is the screen resolution of my site because the resolution of the site is 1024  x 768 which is a kind of square resolution which is a resolution which is very much not being used anymore. The audience of my website would likely have more modern monitors which are widescreen so I wish I remade my website so that is relevant to the target audience.  

The sound effects I implemented into my website add to the scary atmosphere of the website. I used various sounds such as the sound of knife slashes and screaming as this is very much relevant to the genre of the film and that would very effective when appealing to my target audience.


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