For Unit 7 we were asked to make a portfolio website featuring all the videos we have made so far up to this point in the year. This means we will be making a portfolio with 5 videos on it. We were tasked with creating a colourful and creative website that is useful and is organised correctly. I originally got the task wrong and made a blog and not a portfolio website, i will go into more detail about this and how i corrected it late on in my evaluation. A portfolio website will help me a lot in the future to present my work and help a lot to get people to know more about what i do and what i make. My skills in webpage designing were quite high before starting this unit as i had had helped my cousin make her website through Wix for her company, so i knew what i would be getting myself into when starting this unit. I knew how to utilise every tool on websites like Wix and Weebly. This helps a lot because it means i can make my website be as creative as possible.
We did a lot of analysing of websites to see what works well and what does not work well for our websites. I found a lot of interesting things out about websites like how to make sure there isnt any wasted space by having full screen slideshows of work and not to have fonts that are the same colour as the background like i discovered with one of the websites. I found this analysing very useful as i was analysing other portfolio websites to see how they work and how they are formatted to provide as much information as possible in as interesting way as possible. This helped influence my website a lot because i learnt how other professional people have formatted their websites but also seen how not to do it. I found that both websites i analysed had writing that was far too small and not very appealing to read so i will make sure that my writing is colourful and easy to see. I also did some research into other things to learn about what i could include on my website. At this point i was really getting in depth with what i was going to be doing on my website. I made a mood board of my favourite websites that i go to and what impact they have on me, i did this because it helped me to get some ideas that i may want to include on my website that normal portfolio. It also helps me to expand upon what i think makes me visit the websites so much and could possibly incorporate that into my own portfolio website. I chose a couple colour palettes that i really liked and thought i could use on my website. I chose colours that i really liked and were appealing and didn’t clash, i took a lot of things into consideration when choosing these palettes like where i will use each colour and what it could look like on my website. I had to do the same with some fonts and what fonts i could use. I explored Wix’s range of fonts to see which ones they had and how i could incorporate them, i didn’t like the look of many of them and only one did not look cheap and tacky so i chose that one and talked about how i could incorporate it into my website. I also had a look at making a logo and came up with the idea of using the one i had for my YouTube channel and related Twitter and that also allows me to show off some of the work i do outside of college that i have posted to my YouTube channel and i can expand the portfolio side of the website, I thought this would be an amazing idea meaning i can add more artwork and add more stuff to it like blogs and other related things, I really loved this idea so i decided to make the website a portfolio / blog. The name of the website ‘WFA Blogs’ comes from the name of my channel WFA. I also explored making a site plan and was really intrigued at how one website was laid out that i had on my mood board that of the Time Ladies, It was big and easy to see as well as having very visible and eye popping colours. I based my site plan off of their website and added my own bits to it, i also mixed in some ideas i had taken from the portfolios i analysed and made sure they were all included in the site plan then after that was done it was onto making my website.
So, i used Weebly to make my website, it was very easy to make once i had gotten used to where everything was and was pleasantly surprised at how good i could make my website. I did have a few issues with the fonts and having a font i really didn’t like but i overcame this by finding out i can change it in the theme settings and went through hundreds of fonts to find one that i really liked and was pleasantly happy with the results. Another thing i didn’t like was the fact the fonts were also a bit too big on the headers on my blog pages, i also overcame this by changing it in the theme settings and was happy to see i could change each one depending on how big the title was. I am really happy with how the website came out at the end because i managed to make a site that personally exceeded my expectation, i thought it wouldn’t be very good and look a bit meh but after taking time to design it according to my site plan and use the ideas i had taken from the portfolio website and build upon how some of the negatives the portfolios had i was really happy with how it all came out. A good website is one that is easy to access all the pages and looks pleasing to the eye as well as having colours and pictures that look and fit in really well. I tested the website out and was really happy with it all together, only one thing that didn’t seem that good when tested was how long it takes for the titles to appear on the headers. It takes a couple seconds and people could easily scroll past before the title has loaded in and may miss it. I have tried to fix this by changing the fonts and sizes and messing around to see if i could get it ot work a bit faster but overall that doesn’t really work and i still get the same delay or sometimes even slower, so i stuck with what i liked and hoped that it was just my slow internet that was causing the delay. (*EDIT** After writing this whole evaluation i went back to check to see if this was still an issue and am happy to say that it seems to have fixed itself so i am putting it down to having slow internet when first checking, In some cases the text loads in first and that’s brilliant. I am really happy that it now loads in much faster than originally intended.**)
Overall, i did meet my original intentions and did make the website i really hoped for and more. I am really happy with how it came out and i will 100% be adding more to it throughout the future. I love that i now have somewhere i can add my work and show off some of my blogs as well on the side. I am really happy with the design as well as its a very thorough design and i am really happy with how it looks and i think making my own artwork for it really did pay off as once again it helps to show off my work.
My home page is my favourite it details everything i have done and has links to where everything is on the webpage, i also love how it is very similar to my site pla, this means i stuck to it as closely as possible and made sure to follow everything in detail. The portfolio website is unfortunately a bit bland for my liking only due to me running out of time to make it look as nice as i could but with only a week to have this whole unit done i am happy with iit, it does its job of showing off my videos but unfortunately not much writing purely due to the amount of time left. The blog posts pages are my favourites as i can see myself adding more blogs over time and really expanding them as ive always loved to make a blog and now i have one! I love how the pictures take the top on every page the portfolio, the blogs, it really adds uniformity to it and that’s what i love the most because at the end of the day it looks really professional and when people see it they’ll hopefully think the same and if i was a business or a freelance editor the people may consider hiring me due to my website being so well looked after and looking so uniform with everything else, as it also shows i take a lot of car into how it looks. So overall i am very happy with my website and how this unit has gone and do intent to keep adding to my portfolio and blog as time goes on.
Dan's Film and TV Production Blog 