Target Audience

This is one of the most important issues i believe throughout the creation of the website reason being that the people and the age of the people is going to be important if i want to make sure the website suits both. The people im trying to appeal to is people who live in Ireland and people who have migrated. Reason being for people who have migrated is that if they had to move away because of work then they are wondering what they are missing out on, and with this website they will be able to check out all the photos of how the events are going and maybe considering would it be worth while maybe booking a flight home for these events. Irish residents, reason why i want to target these people is that there are a lot of people who don't realise of the different events that happen throughout the whole of Ireland and instead of booking a dear holiday away somewhere they could make a cheap weekend out of things and still have a great time learning. I know from me saying this how am i ever going to attract the age group from 14-60. I believe this age group is achievable mainly because there is a lot for all ages to do for example, if you have a child of say 18/19 who doesn't want to be there, i can defiantly say from experience that the night life while these events are on are probably the best nights craic i will ever have in my life and from being of an age of 22 an friends around the same age i can get them to back me up on this, that means from18-40 is sorted with night life. for the 14-18 i know they cant socialise to the late hours but there are events that run during the day to keep them occupied, tractor reversing, junior sports day etc... and for the 40+ all the activities that happen during the day is more than enough for them. So from all of this i can take away saying that i target Irish people who live and have fled the country from the age of 14-60.

Colour schemes, TypeFaces

The next phase after I have my mock storyboards done was to look at colour schemes for my website. By looking at the other websites that I showed early I am a little bit confused on what way to do it as it the boley fair one was a template used and had a background image of floorboards and an old time newspaper and the colour for the text and images were black and white. I then decided to google colour schemes to see if it could help me any and i found this website http://www.colorcombos.com/

The colour scheme above doesnt really appeal to me at all as what i would hope to maybe include in this website was a bit of an old time look but in a modern way if you understand me. Yes i want the colour green in mainly because Irelands most dominate colour is green so i will look for something that has that colour involved in it. 

I felt from this website that even thought the colour schemes they provided  for you were ok they still werent what i was looking for so i went back to google and chose the next website available to me and that was http://colorschemedesigner.com/

What i found out from this website was that it allowed you to create your own colour scheme this i liked as it meant you could mix around with different colours that i thought would go well with my website. From attempting to create my own scheme i realised it was a lot harder to do than i gave credit to so instead im going to look at different colours separately so that i know what shade i want and then see if i can make them work together.

the greens above i like but the one in the middle is what i hope to use to bring the Irish feeling into it. this colour i feel is bright yet not to dark for the website and with the other colour that i had in mind i think it will go quite well.

The next colour i went to look at was brown, for some mad reason i have this colour in my head to represent the old part of this the culture part of it. the brown in the bottom right is what i am hoping to use but whether this will work out or not is a different story. but only one way to find out which is to try it.

The next part for me to research and try and decide upon is the typeface that i am going to use. Now because this is an irish site do i want to use an old time gaelic style of writing for it or not. the only thing i have against this type of writing is that i am trying to do an old style website but modernise it a bit as well so chosing these correctly is vital.

as you can see from above this typeface is nice yes but whether i could use it throughout the whole website or not is the next thing.

The typeface above i kind of like just because of the look of it, i feel it would give a more modern appeal to my website but whether the two of these typefaces will work will have to be seen later on.

Typographers

Typographers that were given out in class ;

• Jason Santa Maria
• Jan Tschichold
• Khoi Vinh

After going to class on Thursday and hearing these names i thought to myself i actually literally know nothing about them so i made it my aim this week to research them and find out who they are and what they did.

Who is Jason Santa Maria?????

Jason is a graphic designer from Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder of 'Typedia', which is like a Library of typefaces online.

Above is the website that he created. Besides actually just creating this Jason has had such a successful career already as  he has founded the design studio 'Mighty', co founder of 'A Book Apart', vice president of 'AIGA/NY' and creative director of 'A List Apart'.




Jan Tschichold

"Jan Tschichold was an important 20th-century German graphic designer who also gave a major impetus to the Swiss school. Jan Tschichold attended the "Akademie for Grafische Künste and Buchgewerbe "in Leipzig from 1919 until 1921. In 1923 Jan Tschichold visited the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar. Influenced by the new Bauhaus typography, Jan Tschichold began to use serifless typefaces and designed simplified layouts.
In a special 1925 issue of "typographische mitteilungen" entitled "elementare typographie", Jan Tschichold introduced in the form of theses the most important approaches to the new typography design. From 1923 Jan Tschichold freelanced as a commercial graphic artist; his clientele included Insel Verlag publishers. 
From 1926 until 1933, Jan Tschichold taught typography at Paul Renners Master Classes for Book Printers in Munich. In 1933 Jan Tschichold emigrated to Switzerland, where he worked for several publishers in Basel and taught at the School for the Applied Arts. In 1946 Jan Tschichold went to London, where he was art director at Penguin Books until 1949. In 1950 he returned to Switzerland. Between 1955 and 1967 Jan Tschichold worked as a design consultant for the Basel pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche.
Books written by Jan Tschichold, "Die neue Typografie" (1928) and "Typografische Gestaltung" (1935), expound the fundamentals of modern typography."http://www.jan-tschichold.com/




Khoi Vinh

"Khoi Vinh (born December 3, 1971) is a graphic designer, blogger, and former Design Director for the The New York Times, where he worked from January 2006 until July 2010. He was born in 1971 in Saigon, Vietnam and immigrated to the United States at the age of three and a half with his family. He grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland and Orange County, California. He attended Otis College of Art and Design, graduating with a major in Graphic Design in 1993. In 1998, he moved to New York and began designing almost exclusively for the web and interactive media.

In 2001, he founded a design studio, Behavior, with colleagues, which he left when he went to work at the The New York Times"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoi_Vinh

paper prototyping

"Paper prototyping is a variation of usability testing where representative users perform realistic tasks by interacting with a paper version of the interface that is manipulated by a person ‘playing computer,’ who doesn’t explain how the interface is intended to work." – Paper Prototyping

Above is an image of a persons drawing that they have done. Basically it shows the layout of the website they are looking to create an also what information there should be in it.

But before i could start sorting out the layout for my website i firstly had to sort out what i was going to call this website of mine and also if the domain name was free for me to use. 

I start of by doing a bit of brainstorming.

I tried to think of things that had to do with irish culture. So the ideas i had were;

• Food
• sport
• fairs
• language
• jobs
• skills
• people
• places
• dancing

these are what i perceived to have any connection with Irish culture from this was the next thing to expand on these to try and create a name. I expanded on the points that i created but trying to think of a name was a bit harder than i first thought. my names all entailed using the word irish for example;

• Irishfairs
• irishevents
• irish culture
• irelands events

but then when i looked back at my sheet i noticed that i had the word language wrote down which then lead me to think about using our own native irish in the name of the site. So from this i started to generate names using the irish language. The one that stood out out to me the most was irish culture.

I then decided to see what i could do with this, i tried doing the whole lot in irish "cultur na hEireann" which means irish culture but the main problem i got with this was when people were trying to remember the websites name and trying to spell it so that knocked that one right out of the park. I then sat down and kept thinking to myself what way can i adjust this so that people who dont speak or write read the native language could remember how to spell the name and then it hit me. Cultur Ireland. This i thought was the perfect name to use for my site as it had a bit of irish in it and also a bit of english so if anybody was trying to remember the name and spell it, it would be quite easy for them to do so. Cultur is the irish word for culture but in the irish lanuage the way the word the sentencing is quite strange as its back to front if you understand me so by putting cultur first made it seem as if i was using the irish language for all of it but then by putting Ireland in english at the end makes it easier for people to rememeber and not seem as if its in irish if you understand me. The only thing i could see was for when im creating the logo there is a fada across the top of the second u in the word cultur and in a domain name u cant have that. besides that i would still like to include it in the logo as i feel it gives the logo a touch of Irish to it. Now that i got the name sorted i decided to check to see if the domain name was free for it and luckily enough it was so i have the choice of;

• www.culturireland.com
• www.culturireland.co.uk
• www.culturireland.org
• www.culturireland.ie
• www.culturireland.info

which one to chose i dont know. I was leaning towards the .ie one more than any as its stating that it is irish but by consulting with a class mate they also pointed out that the website that i was creating was also an information site which then got me to think more along the lines of .info as this would state to people that it was an information site so they know what they are getting from it. I will leave this to sort out closer to the time of my MMP (major project Proposal).

Logo design I will leave for a while yet till i get the design of the page decided upon. I remember from class that they were talking about the 12 column rule that new york times use or something so i went and googled it and found this website...

This website allowed you to generator the 12 columns across a website to see if it had it or not here are a few example below.

As you can see from above that there is 12 columns and each column is 60 pixels wide, each colunm has a gap of 10 pixels either side of it which create 20 pixel wide gutters. This layout is very good for getting the exact layout for your site.

after researching this i decided to crack away at my own website. this was still being done using pen and paper.

Event page- your probably wondering what the wee drawing is in the middle but what i hopefully plan to do is have a map of Ireland, created using flash, were the four provinces are hotspots and you click on one to find out the events in that province. At the top I have the navigation as i said earlier that i prefered this compared to it down the side. I have the logo at the top right corner and a news feed and contact box on the right of the map. Reason form this was when i saw the mayo website that i liked the idea of news feed constantly going at the side of the page. finally there is a simple footer at the bottom of the page.

Gallery- this page is the exact same concept as from the one above only instead of inforation about the evnts this will show images and videos from them.

contact- this page has the same layout as the rest but in the main div it has a contact form at the end of all the relative contact information is given. reason for the the form at the end of this is for anybody who wants to contact me quickly and personally can do so with ease.

This is the ulster page that will appear when u click on it in either the gallery or events page, again it is spilt into separate hotpsots for each county but the twist to this page is once the county has been clicked you have all the events links below in a separte div. this will allow you to still be able to see the map and also be able to see the events to see if any of them catch your eye and you would like to explore them more.

same concept as ulster

same concept as ulster

same concept as ulster

these are just temporary storyboards there not the finished article yet.

On each of the event pages i would like to have a google api that showed were they were at. This is a new technique for me so i will have to research it first to see how you would go about doing such a thing.

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.

Features

Now that i have my name and target audience achieved, the next thing for me to do is to think of a catchy slogan that i can use for my website. This requires a lot of thinking but luckily enough i also found a website that helps you out with this. from this website i got a few examples of slogans that i could use for my website

• Cultur ireland. Its evrywhere you wana be
• Designed for Cultur Ireland
• we're serious about Cultur Ireland

these are a few that i got from the website but i then though about trying to create my own after seeing a few examples and i came up with

• Where theres Ireland theres Cultur
• What would Ireland be without Cultur
• Great Cultur Ireland. Great Times

From the options that i have above i have narrowed it down to two of which i like and think would look well on my website they are

• Cultur ireland. Its evrywhere you wana be
• Where theres Ireland theres Cultur

Im leaning more towards the one i thought of as its more original as i thought of it anybody could use that website and have the same slogan as me. I will not decided yet but when it comes closer to the time if i havnt thought of anything better i will use the one i created. 

Week 3- Chosen Idea

My chosen idea as I spoke about last week is that of Culture Fairs throughout Ireland. I searched the web and there are a few individual websites that try and promote that soul fair. Here are a few examples;

Boley Fair,
Hilltown,
Co. Down

Castlewellan Show,
Castlewellan
Co Down

Balmoral show
Belfast
Co Down





These are just a few of the websites that show of the fairs that happen in down, there are a lot more yet that I could show you just for Down, there are vintage shows, Plough fairs etc...
From seeing that there is no main website showing all of these I’m let to think whether to start off by just doing one county or do I take it a wee bit further and maybe venture into Ulster these are the things I have to look at to see whether ill have the time to concentrate on something as big as Ireland or do I concentrate on showing them just in my own county.

As being a follower of Irish culture and what it entailed the idea of a website containing all of the events that take place in Ireland really appealed to me. A website like this will allow people to book weekend aways in advance so that they wont be charged a lot more when it comes closer to the date of the event. also it will help small villages that host these maybe gain a wee bit of a profit as the more people there the more money they are going to make. I can confirm this as there is an event that takes place each year in my local village called hilltown. the event that takes place is called the boley fair. it starts on a Friday and isn't over until the following Tuesday. in recent years i have to say that it was wilding done but finally due to proper advertisement, radio, papers and internet it has become very popular as for example there is an event called sheep clipping were you have to clip the wool of a ewe in the fastest time, sue to this event and the proper advertisement for it we now have people coming from the likes of Kilkenny and Offaly just to enter it and by them entering it they also attract friends and family to come to it. so from this i believe the website that i am looking to create could be a great success.
Another great event that helped promote this event more was the Irish bands that were on in pubs throughout the village when these bands put on such a good nights craic it meant that it got good reviews the next day and more and more came so by creating a website i maybe could have some kind of chat thing like the likes of facebook which will allow people to post how great of a time they had so that other people would maybe consider coming to it the following year.
There are many more events that happen at this fair for example, tosing the sheaf, stone cutting, tractor revesring, skittles, horse shoe throwing, oil paintings, celie, and many more so promoting these on the internet will allow people from ireland and even people who have left the country to look back on it.