Here I have drawn 4 pages for my website just to show what style and colours I would use on the real site. Now I can use these ideas and perfect them for the real website which I will design later.

Preliminary Task: Planning- Storyboard

Research and Planning- preliminary task designing

What is the website’s purpose?
The website I am creating is for a secondary school, and its purpose is to advertise the school to new students, inform parents of our views/values and learning style in the school. It should also inform current students of upcoming events, latest news and offer support on any problems they have i.e. homework, coursework or bullying.

Who are the audience of the website?
The audience for my website is teenagers aged 13-19 who are students in the school, and also people wishing to join. It is also aimed at parents

What does the website have to do to communicate?
My school website has to communicate to the audience what a great school it is, and what we offer to new students. Our school site, values and learning styles have to be put across and we need to appear to be a friendly school, a place where learning is fun.

What will the personality of the website be? (e.g. formal, informal, or fun if for a primary school)
The personality of my website is going to be a mixture of formal and informal. This is so I can give the audience all the necessary information about joining the school e.g. contact details, but also so it has a laid-back feel and students don’t feel pressured and put off joining the school.

Preliminary Task: Research Website Conventions

A media convention is widely acknowledged as the ‘way to do things’, such as in a newspaper: the name, date and price are all situated at the top and the sports page is on the back, because those are the unofficial rules which everyone complies to. They are useful because if everyone designs their newspaper in the same way, the audience will know where everything is and doesn’t have to learn a whole new layout again and again. Convention guidelines are generally followed to make navigation and designing easier.

Here are 3 websites which break usual conventions- they all have one large, main picture in the centre with interactive links and photos moving around the page. The navigation links are all situiated somewhere differently- either at the top, in the centre, or at the bottom. Their pallette is also wide ranged, with many different colours used on each site. I like these websites more than a regular design, because they are artistic, and you know hard work has been put in to create them.

Preliminary Task: Research- Analysing Existing Websites

Above is my analysis of All Saints Waddington Primary School's website.


























Above is my analysis of Lincoln University's website.

Above is my analysis of Woodlands Junior School's website.

Above is my final analysis of Lincoln College's website.

For the first task, I have taken and analysed 4 different school websites based on the conventions of website design including: layout, colour, target audience, navigation, images, text, logos and the overall website design.

They are mostly similar in comparison. All have some sort of nav bar at the top, containing links to other pages concerning the school. All are updated regularly with sections of news and information, so regular users can quickly look.

However, they differ in style, layout and colour scheme. Each has very different primary colours as the base for the site, making them stand out differently. Their layouts differ as well, with images, navigation links and search bars all in different places so it is harder for audiences to navigate the page quickly, because they have to look for what they want.