Research

after chosing my final idea i now had to research into what i could maybe include in my website what other websites have etc... The first thing to do is to make out a list of what i might want to have in my website:

• Gallery page
• Stick with ulster or do whole of Ireland
• Contact form
• A posting site for people to put reviews up
• history (whats the event about)
• calender which will show all the events dates etc...

These are just a few simple things that i would like to include in my website but firstly i will have to look at websites that already have these functions to see how well they are designed and how well they work out. The image below shows the boley fair website the one that i have already talked about but looking at it straight away i noticed they didnt have a gallery page this startled me to start of with it as if your going to promote anything you need to show people what it is about. In fairness when i dug a wee bit furthur i noticed they had photos attached in the articles and when i ran my cursor over them it showed that there was a link attached to them once clicking on it, it brung up a lightbox with a few photos so i thought to myself this might be there gallery. in my own opinion i was a bit shocked as it was only by chance that i ran my mouse over the photo that i found this out. But from this i can take as a postive note towards myself when creating my website that it will be easier for the user if they could see the word gallery.

opening page with no gallery link

Light box gallery

The next thing i looked at while i was on this website was the contact page and what i found interesting on it was the map they had at the bottom to show people were exactly the village was. I hadnt thought of this technique to use but i am pleased i stumbled upon this as it could be a useful feature to my website.

Contact page for boley fair

I then decided to look at other sites such as balmoral show as it would be one of the major events that happen every year.

As you can see from the image above this site would be more detailed as the amount of links they have down the left hand side of the page is a lot. As this is one of the major events i had an idea that this website would be of a high quailty as already they have a sponsership banner running along the bottom of it. I the navigation is on the left hand side, to me personally i prefer all the navigation to be at the top of the page i just fell its easier to build a nicer looking website this way.

The image above i am extremely disappointed with as the gallery i believe is quite basic and it doesnt even give the viewer an option of what type of photo they would like to see as i know myself being to this event that it scales from machinery, animals, foods, dancing etc... and personally i would rather have the option of which ones i would like to look at than having to look through all of them. This is a good pointer to see as making a gallery is some what difficult to do as you don't know what actual way to design it but looking at this one it has really made up my mind on what way i should do mine.

As i have mentioned in my recent blogs about how it would be useful as it would allow people to book ahead for weekends etc... well from looking at the website balmoralshow.com i saw that in the vistors information page that they gave a listing of hotels, b&bs etc.. that were close by. i never even thought of including this in my website but from mentioning it earlier i think it should be introduced into it, what way i still am not sure but shall come back to that at a later stage.

Sticking on the same site i decided to look into it a bit further to see if it had a calender showing all the events that were going to take place on the day on this event. I found a timetable as they called it but was very disappointed with it as it was in a pdf form and took forever to load up. I didnt like this as when i click on something i like it to be quite responsive and work quite quickly. this i will have to look into in more detail to see is it worth while dedicating a page for a calendar or whether it would save time and money creating it in a pdf format this will take some consideration. 

After looking at a few ulster sites, if i was going to do the whole of Ireland i needed to look at other ones, I decided to look at a site in mayo which i found a lot more useful straight away as there design of the page was more pleasing towards the eye. What also caught my eye was the news feed that scrolled up automatically, this got me thinking whether do i want a news page or could i skip a page like that out and maybe just have a constant news feed throughout the whole of my website. the only fault i had with this news feed was that the pace of the scrolling was set to an awfully high speed as you never got to see the information for that long of a time which is disappointing as i believe that the idea of this is to give the people the chance to read it. From the last site i looked at i complained about the pdf format that they used for there page for a timetable but at looking at this site i seen a they had a calendar on there homepage a simple one at the bottom left which allowed people to see what were the latest up and coming events. I like this idea as if people can see the whole 30/31 days there are in a month they can look and plan which days they would like to go and see whats happening.

Bar the few features i have mentioned above there was nothing else on this site that really appealed to me. i then went on to look at other sites in other parts of the country but this i found quite difficult as events that i knew of i could not find any websites promoting them which actually was quite annoying but i did find one site in dublin well it promoted the event but didnt have an actuall website for it.

This is a shame becasue dublin being the captial on the county you would like to have thought that there would actually be more promotion for it. But on the plus side for me this means that i could maybe get more events to advertise and also means that maybe in the future of this website i could charge for hosting these events and also included sponsership in it.