Finalizing for hand in

Today I finalized and got together all my work ready for handing in.

By now everything is finished to the best it's going to get in this time. All I need to do is ensure all of my research is completed, then it all needs to be printed.

Overall I enjoyed this unit because I found it quite challenging to learn and remember things in dreamweaver. It was also good to learn about how businesses use the internet to promote themselves and make money with great effect. From this unit I think I have recognised the potential of using the internet for alot of different means from making money to socialising.

I think the only part of this unit I disliked was the researching, but I know that it was usefull to me when I made my site.

More Research

Today I looked at the basics of how to make a good and effective website.
I looked at everything from colours to typography and I think it taught me alot about how to, and how not to make a website.
I will apply some of these lessons to my site where needed however I think I have allready encorporated quite a few of them.

Website Design

Today I worked more on my website design and it is now pretty much finalized apart from a few tweaks needed to the navigation bar. After this all I need to do is make another 2 slightly different pages before putting them onto Dream Weaver.

Using Layers in Dream Weaver

We looked at how layers can be used in dreamweaver to then be converted into tables. This is a less confusing way to do it, tables can get confusing with the different settings and changing each size individually. If you put everything into layers and then convert them to tables it can be much easier.

Dreamweaver Frames

We looked at making a website using frames in dreamweaver.

This is a quick, easy and nice looking way to make a site, it's only downfall is that search engines don't recognize them as easily because it uses multiple documents to make up the website rather than one.

Virgin Website

We looked at the Virgin website and went over bad points of it. The website is not well made for people with visual impairments due to it's colouration.

Also because it is all in Flash it brings up other potential problems with viewers and search engines as the only information available would be the name of the flash file rather than all of the information within it. Though, due to Virgin being so well known they do not need to ensure on SEO because if someone searches for Virgin they will find virgin.
Sites made completely in Flash are more made to look good rather than to be optimized for search engines, this makes it a good possible choice for a larger brand company but for an independant business, a not so good one.

SEO

Today we looked a bit at SEO, it is pretty interesting as it makes a huge difference when trying to advertise your site. If your site is not optimized, it won't be found.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the main way to drive traffic to your website, generating yourself more revenue etc.

This can be done in many ways, but the main ways are using words that direct the Google engine to your website. This works by adding Keywords, Headings, Description. These features, along with many other things help optimize your website for search engines. This is because when someone searches a word, such as Monkey, if a website has the word Monkey in it's keyword, description and title it will push it up the table because Google attempts to return the most relevant pages to the user.

Google Video

Today we looked at an interesting video about Google. It describes how you Google works, how it grew and how it makes so much money today. Also towards the end it started questioning Google's morals, that they are like a "big brother" monitoring everyones activity that uses Google and using it to change things, and sometimes sharing it with the US government.

The video was really interesting and it showed what Google's future will be and what people think of what Google are doing etc.

Page research

Today I compared good and bad websites and good and bad myspace pages. I compared and wrote about the basic design features of my 4 chosen links and then said why i thought they were good/bad and how they compared to the other one. I also included screen grabs of main features of the website and how I think they work well. We also set up this blogger account for use as a reflective journal.

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