For my Production A Networked Media assignment I decided to create an online exhibition. The topic I chose to create this exhibition on was Anime and I decided that I would write reviews for various anime I had watched. At first I considered doing a series of blog posts but I honestly just do not like blogs. My next option was to create a website which I thought would be a better idea because I was interested in learning HTML. My main aim when creating this website was for it to be as straightforward as possible so the reader could get the information they wanted without any difficulties. In order to do this I had a standard black background, and an easy to read font. I set it out in a user friendly format with the links to the left side of the page, a heading picture up the top and all the main information down the middle. I also decided that I would link all my pictures back to their original sources so that people could navigate to these sites and view other pictures of interest of download the specific picture if they wanted to. I also decided to add a video down the bottom of all the pages to create interest and give the reader a bit of understanding of the reviewed shows.
I have also created links to other sites in the area that my website relates to. For example I linked it to an online anime streaming site and some sites that give specific information about anime. I also linked it to my blog because if I ever did post something like this online, if viewers liked my reviews they might also like my blog and could visit it.
I have visited quite a lot of anime review sites in my time because I generally like to look at other people’s opinions before I start to watch one. This goes for many other areas of Media, as I like to look at reviews for movies, music, games etc. The thing that I really dislike a lot about these sites is their layout is sometimes really congested. They have a lot of ads and links happening and then the information is in a little box that you have to squint your eyes at to read. I took this into account when I made my website so the information was nice and easy to read.
Another thing that I do not like about other review sites is that critics are usually really harsh. Speaking for myself and others that I have talked to about this, critics just seem to only find the bad points in things. They seem to overlook a lot of the positives. With my reviews I tried to get a happy medium between talking about the good and the bad points in all my reviews.
This was pretty much the first time that I had used HTML so when I started the production of this website my skills were non-existent. I picked up things slowly and had a lot of trouble trying to get certain parts of code to work. There was this one time that I spent 2 hours in the tute trying to figure out how div tags worked. By the end of the tute I just had no idea what the problem was an no one could shed any light on it. When I got home later that day I opened it up again and low and behold it was working. I also had a lot of difficulty trying to embed youtube videos in my html. I was looking up all this code on various tutorial sites. I could not get it to work so I asked a friend and he told me that youtube is very HTML friendly. You just right click on the video you want and an option comes up to copy embed code. You then paste this code on the HTML and your set. Whilst working on my website I encountered many problems like this and through online tutorials and help from classmates I slowly started to understand HTML a lot better. One website which gave me a lot of help was called w3schools. It pretty much had most of the information you could ever need to create both HTML and CSS aspects of a webpage.
Some of things that I would of liked to have done on my website was to create some drop down menus or some kind of javascript. For example a rollover feature where the picture gets larger or some sort of user search directory. I have also been working on making me own anime video compiled of different clips from different animations. I have been working on this for 2 months in my spare time but its no where near finished. These kinds of things I would of liked to have incorporated but due to skill level and lack of time I had to make some choices to make finishing the site realistically possible.
Overall I am very happy with how my final product turned out. Although I did no manage to finish it in the sense of doing everything I wanted, I created a polished product with what I could manage. I have also gained a greater understand on how HTML works even if it is not my favourite thing in the world.
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