Merchandising Development: Site Creation

As head of marketing it is my duty to produce a high-quality website that can be easy to navigate and learn about our content and its creators, this means I will be working closely with everyone to make sure all pieces of work are features while also appealing to the target audience. As we are working with a science fiction-based themes I will be using a colour plate of red, blues, pink, yellow and green as they are the main sets that can be seen in space and other space themed productions.

To create the website, I will be using WIX.com as they are a reliable website builder I have used for past projects and my own personal portfolio. With this site it allows me to be able to add my own content and customs features with an option to add others to add to the site.

To get a rough idea on what I’m doing with the website I will be setting up the basic pages I need for everyone’s content and applying basic titles and navigation buttons so that I can get a feeling of how it would look and what I can add of my own content.

In between being away from creating the site I have also done a few quick sketches of how I envisioned the lay out. By drawing the idea down, it allows me to keep tabs on ideas quickly and to get an overlook of some possibilities of creating the sites layout.

So that other members of the team can have input onto the website I have sent each member of the team an invite to join with full access to do as they with, but I have also told them in a group chat not to add content directly onto the page until I have organised it all ready for them and they each respected that and awaited my call.

So that we can all keep tab on whose is whose I had created set folders with their names on it so that they can all see their content in one place and this makes it easier for me to also organise the site accordingly.

With this section of the page this allows me to keep tabs on who can see the content we produce while also being able to find us and even join our website if we were to have a following. For the time being I will be filling out the basic necessities and then later on I will sit with my team to make sure it is set up for how they wish.

On this site we will also be producing blogs to show people how we developed our game and its content. As everyone is set to admin we all have the ability to each look over each other’s work to support each other if we are to ask but mainly we will be focusing on our own.

With one issue I did find on wix is if people wanted to work on their blogs and they went through the edit site page I found that this stopped anyone who wanted to focus on section of the website. I had to inform our members how they had to access the blogs so that they didn’t disturb those who did want to use the site.

One feature of the blogs page is that everything that is produced on our site is all thrown into one place, there is an option to hide this page and have tagged posts on separate pages However, I have decided to keep this one open so that it makes it easier for users to find our content even if a post hasn’t been tagged yet.

Here I have shown an example of one of our members work, as you can see it is tagged under a part of development and a name. This is so that I can feature blogs separately on their page about them and it allows people to search for something directly and discover things related.

I had created a page that would talk Briefly about our studios and the members individually so that it allows people to gain an in site into who we are and to introduce us.

As I wanted to create custom backgrounds for our site and content, I have been using boxes that would tell me how many pixels long the site was so that I could open up a photoshop file to match so I can get an accurate measurement.

For our website I wanted to create a story of the visuals by having you start on earth using planets from our solar system…

then when you enter the site it brings you to a bright and colourful landscape of stars and milky ways to show your somewhere new.

Just like the creation of our character I had also played with the filters for the backgrounds to create new colours and affects to create different colour schemes for each page.

Here is a set I had created for this site and have used throughout

From what I had created previously I enjoyed the use of the launch button however, for some reason there seemed to be an option to hover over the button with changed but it wasn’t how I wanted it to look, as a small cheat I set the blue button to deactivate and the pink one to link to the ‘Meet the team’ page then I hooked the buttons onto an interactive hover box so that I could have two different colour buttons without the settings muddling up.

Once I had the content ready, I have reworked the design of the website by setting text boxes into bright colours and glowing affects to event text fonts that look science fiction based. For the meet the team page I included a small slide show to let people have a teaser of work they can see with a description of what our team is and the goal. I also included our place of studied logo with a hidden Easter egg of if you click it, it takes you to look at our game course. As added fun on our pictures for this page I set the images to look like they were taken from an old printable camera with tags to roles we will as a space team making for fun reading.

As well as what is seen on the meet the team page each member had their very own section to fill out by having links to their own websites, a better description about them and direct feature links to the blogs they have personally created.

As we currently have no direct sources of our merchandise caused by unfortunate events I have stuck to using what we had created as a tease to what could come in the future. I created some banners with catchy phrases that could capture peoples attention and I had also included a few more models that could possibly be produced using images of assets that the others made.

As the creation of everything we have done so far has still got further to go I have created a page for everyone to create their own post to update our fans what we still have to do and what more could happen in the future.

As we have both audio and visual content I though it was the best idea to feature those on the site. As there was an option to include these I asked the members if they had any content they wanted and this is what we had to offer, some have ever added them to their blogs.

After gathering all that I could I’m glad to say that the development of our website is completed. Due to some issues with wix some features tend to have a mind of their own and move, I’m unsure what causes this but I have done all that I can to make sure the site it up to date and usable for everyone. If you see to the menu on the screen this is all the pages we have to offer including a few sub pages.

The development doesn’t stop there! The website isn’t just for a computer but it is also for a phone too, here on the Wix app some of our content can be viewed by member so that they can even update their blogs on the go making it easier to access.

Our website is also fully accessible through iPhone on a smaller scale, to develop this section you cant delete features as they have to be removed from the original page, thanks to this it makes it easier to organise but content that doesn’t fit or look great can be hidden from site without affecting the original.