Finished Client

Areas of strength

I think I have understood the brief well, I now have good knowledge on ATRG and the products they produce and hope this comes across through the website. I have created a scrolling 5 page site which gives the user a sense of facilities on offer, sense of the expertise, staff and student and are left with the lasting impression of the tag line I created and Twitter and Facebook details.

I researched well into this project before creating the site, looking at sites for inspiration, creating mood boards, logo ideas, colour themes and wireframes to see what would best fit into the concept of the website. I have used many different skills to construct the site, Photoshop,  Dreamweaver, JavaScript, HTML5 and JQuery.

I have blogged all my process from start to finish, from very first initial ideas to the finished project. I have shown the ideas I had, why I applied them to the work, how it worked, if it didn’t work so well – for example using a light box gallery to show images didn’t have the effect I thought it would, as it became very boring for the user looking at very similar photos of the textile machinery.

The finished product of my site, I personally feel meets the assignment brief soundly. I think the logo and tagline are effective, the font used fits well into the theme of ATRG. I’m glad I kept to the idea of having a scrolling site, considering the site is aimed at an audience of whom are research students/researchers who are interested in the group and want to join as a career and crucially prospective investors, the site has to be informative yet contemporary. The scrolling gives it slight edge to the standard 5 page site.

I particularly think the contact page is effective in terms of the ability to contact ATRG but also the lasting impression of the Twitter and Facebook page, placed on the contact page and then again on the footer, both being at the bottom of the scroll page so the user can’t be distracted away from the site until they have covered all the pages.

My site is compatible with all browsers, although due to some JavaScript code it is best viewed in Firefox. The interactive experience leads to users having a lasting positive impression of ATRG.

Areas to improve

In terms of improving my work, I would like more of a better text and image ratio. I do think there is a lot of text in each section but the purpose being to inform the user to ATRG and the facilities, I found it hard to achieve this without so much text.

I did have a textile colour theme I found on AdobeKuler but because of the background  changed to, only white worked well with is as a background so the other colours had to change to fit to this and I don’t think it works quite as well, maybe looking a little dull.

I found it quite difficult at first creating a site for a client whom I knew very little about, so had to research quite a lot into ATRG until I could understand fully what they did.

Seeing my peers final product, I would have quite like to have the timeline on the site, however I feel this would have fitted the brief of what we have done more than mine of where we are now better, I would like an element to show information other than just text.

I did initially want a theme for the site, a modern world science feel shown with colours, images and text to engage the audience, creating curiosity but at the same time creating user awareness.  The science theme was hard to create due to the codes not working for moving the background .I think the site no longer has a theme but more of just this is ATRG site.