Marking

Your evaluation is missing quite a lot, and will suffer marks wise. There isn’t any planning present, and although you have evaluated reasonably, there is not evidence from your survey, nor any illustrations of how your work has developed.

Website: some links aren’t working and there are bits of alignment that need to be sorted out. Sometimes the red font on the green background is difficult to read, and occasionally there is a lot of wasted space.

All that said, the site is still very attractive, and there are one or two parts of it that are outstanding.

Absences and a lack of application have at times been a problem, and this has also cost you a sensible grade.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Using iweb to construct this website was very useful as other types of website creators such as html are quite difficult to use as you have to keep adding in different HTML in for different things, whereas iweb you can easily add pictures and text and move them around the page, also this software looks very professional. The pictures taken were mainly from a camera phone which we found to have better quality of picture then the camera's provided, these pictures also gave a better picture when they were altered, for example cropped and resizing. Not being a regular mac user i wasn't familiar with the software and layout of the computer, saying this however it wasn't hard to get use to and the software on it was of a better quality then one of a windows, also they were faster and more reliable then the windows software, where we encountered no problems with it.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Zoo's in England are very popular with families, especially ones with young children. So media products that are also aimed at younger children or that will be viewed by adults that have younger children will appeal to us and will likely distribute our media product. The main product we will be looking to affiliate with is search engines e.g google, ask etc, this is because they gain more hits then any other sites as they are the search engines for all the other sites on the web, this will give us maximum exposure to the audience we wish to aim at, and even if the audience that we wish to aim at aren't on the search engines, there will be enough exposure to balance it out. The other forms of media are also appealing to be advertised in as they gain exposure for people that do not own a computer or cant access the Internet, these forms include newspapers, these are a good way to gain exposure as they are easily accessible and also they are exchangeable, by this i mean newspapers are left on trains, buses etc, so you don't even need to buy one in order to be reading one, so this is a very valuable form of media, although expensive the risk is one to take as the amount of people seeing them is worth a lot. The same can be said for television and radio, but for these two a short advert between programmes, again this is expensive but in the end will reap the benefits. Another form of distribution, and is possibly the most affective form is word of mouth, so if they have seen the website or visited the park they can spread word of how good it is and inform more and more people, the good thing about this is that it costs nothing, therefore we make maximum profit from this form.

How does your media product product represent particular social groups?

Our website isn't really aimed at a particular class, this is because we do not wish to aim at a particular group and excluded the possibility of others being interested in it, this may lose us supporters when they could want to help.

We have targeted our site to mainly appeal to young children, this is because they are the ones that are going to be most interested in attending the park. We realised that young children would not be able to make there own way to the park, so they will tell there parents to take them, and then they will tell there friends and the website will be viewed on a more broader scale. We done this by trying to keep the language simple as young children may not be able to understand longer terminology. Also we tried to incorporate pictures that are of a softer imagery so that it attracts the younger viewer and appeals to them. So on the whole we tried to make the website as easy to maneuver around and as easy to read as possible, this is because we wanted a wide range of people to view the site and we didn't want to disinterest anyone or have anyone disinterested because of the language used was too hard to read/understand, because of their age etc.

How did it attract/address your audience?

Before creating the website for this organisation, we looked into many different animal websites to gain a idea of what sort of layout, colours, pictures etc should be used. We noticed that most sites used simple text so that longer worded sentences do not confuse them if they aren't familiar with them, but in simplifying these words this doesn't mean we have missed any information we have just changed it to a simpler form. The paragraphs form is also very short and to the point that are broken up by pictures to keep the reader interested, and stop them getting bored while reading them. Also while looking at these other websites we noticed that the colours they had used were very earthy e.g greens browns, this has been incorporated into our website as we feel that this convention is a widely accepted one throughout different zoo websites.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

We aimed our website at younger children, this was because younger children are interested in animals and are interested in going to zoo's. Our site reflects this as we tried to incorporate lots of different pictures of different animals so that they can get a good insight to a variety of different animals and broadens there knowledge of rarer animals, making them want to come to the zoo and see them. We have also used a simple layout so that they find it easier to use the site and so that they don't get annoyed at not being able to use any technical links on the site and become disinterested in coming to the zoo. For one of our pages we made it into a competition page, this is because it brings young children and the zoo to more like a team and they feel part of the community, this could benefit us as they will be more interested in future competitions and promotions.
To find our target audience we used a survey. we found that people between the ages of 21-30 years of age and have a yearly salary of 11,000-20,000 pounds a year, were more likely to be interestedand actually participate in donating to our charity.

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The website we have created is a charitable website for a zoo, " Cambridge animal reserve". It is a zoo that enables people throughout the UK to visit the park to see animals from all over the world, also trying to conserve endangered species. The zoo is run by the donations and entry fee's.

The site we have produced follows the conventions of other animal websites as, usual zoo websites use background colour that match a habitat of the type of animal it is, that is why we have used green as the primary colour as green is a colour that is typically associated with the outdoors and animals live in the outdoors so it goes hand in hand. We have changed the background colours as the type of animal changes, so for the aquatic animals we have used blue's as blue is the typical colour associated with water so it follows the conventions of other zoo's websites.

On our website we have used borders that have been created to look as if they have been drawn on over lapping each other at the corners, this gives the site a more rugged look which connotes the outdoor look. The pictures we have used do follow the conventions of a typical zoo website, as on "Chester zoo's" website they have pictures of many different layers of grass in the background on the homepage, and then they have the picture of the animal they are describing on the page. These pictures on the homepage are cartooned, this may show the demographics they are trying to make there website appeal to. Whereas our website has pictures of animals on the main page in black and white, this is because the pictures we have taken have lots of different colours in the background so with them all together the colours will clash and the whole thing just wouldn't work, making it not appeal to the user, so we used a neutral colour and blended them all together. For the pictures on our pages for the animals they have a mixture of long shots and close ups, this is to show the full size of the animals to the user which in turn could interest them more if they know the actual size, compared to London zoo where they have just done close ups, this just gives them a bigger picture of an animal. The text that London zoo has used on its animal pages aren't the best as they have almost bullet pointed the information on the animal, this shows the actual demographics of this website as they wish to aim it at younger children as they are intrigued by the colours of the backgrounds and the animals, they can also read the information provided easily. We have tried to follow in the easy reading but we haven't simplified it that much so there are still sentence like structures to the paragraphs but the information is still easy enough for the younger children browsing the website.