Week 5

This week, as well as catching up on my Flash skills (I'm having some problems uploading the .swf files of my practicing to the blog, will try to add later) I have been working on designs for the website. The Flash stuff we have covered has been fairly basic - making stickmen walk across a screen, making a little point and click game - useful stuff really, because I had completely forgot some elements - so it really helped. I don't feel like much of the practice will really benefit my project, but it's good to remember how to do certain things. I am thinking of trying to use stuff like moving grass or something in future review conversions. But anyway, on to the website...

I have decided I want it to be quite basic and minimalist to give more focus on the images that accompany each review. Here is a quick sketch of how I want it to look;


Click the thumbnail to enlarge

That's just for the home page, but obviously the content box would change on each page; the reviews page would display each review in the boxes, the news would have updates etc.

I think in the initial stages, I will just stick to my original idea of nothing fancy, just the images next to the text. At least in the pilot stage. After this, I may look into some other approaches, like doing artwork myself and focussing on more of a data collection process, like I mentioned before with looking at frequency of words used etc. - as well as looking to implement a rollover AP Div style word highlighting mechanism. So when the image is rolled over, the corresponding text in the review will become highlighted.