My First Website

In the previous module in university it was required of us to create a website, unfortunately I underestimated the amount of time and effort that this required and as such it was not up to the highest standard that it could have been, it was rushed last minute and I think that shows in the quality of the design.

I used a white, black and grey design of my website, it also had a pale pink accent colour in to break up the monochrome; this needs changing as it does not reflect my brand in any way. I used the grey background because of the focus on retouching and the connotations it had to Photoshop. I think I like the use of grey and although I may change the tone and shade I am going to stick with the grey background.

This was my landing page of the website, but as I was testing the websites transferability to other internet operating software such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari I noticed that the website looked different if the page was not displayed full screen on the monitor; the ‘Welcome’ would move up and down the page and sometimes be over the pegs rather than being in the sunset. I knew that I could not control how people viewed my screen so I had to change my landing page in order for this not to be a problem. Within the website I could not find a way to change this so they stayed relative to each other.

Another problem I ran into was at first I could not enter my own website because I had the words ‘Photography’ and ‘Retouching’ separate to the line in the middle, although it only looks like a line the text box around it spreads over both words, because this was arranged to be on top of the words it meant that the words could not be clicked as it was blocked by the empty space in the line’s textbox. Thankfully this was an easy mistake to fix once I realised what had happened.

This is the page for my Photography; it is a slideshow of all my images that I think are successful. I think in my next design I will be splitting my types of photography into different groups such as still life and nature rather than having them side by side as it appears too jumbled together. The second image shows the bottom half of the page with all the slideshow images, one option I did not consider was having the slideshow vertically along the side, I think that would have looked better than what I have done.

At the time of making my website I only focused on my still life images and I did not consider uploading other images; I have family photography and portrait photography I have done but I did not want to include these as it was not what I was needing to advertise I could do.

My retouching page shows some before and afters, which show off my skill and what I have done to the images. When I was researching I wanted to include a slider to the image so that viewers could interact with them and drag the slider along themselves, I had seen this design done on many retouching tutorial websites but I could not find a way to do this. I have continued my research on this and have since found a few ways that this would be possible to do.

Also on my website I have included a short bio about myself: