Unnecessary Thinking

After completing the "paint place", we have been given packets of reading material from "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. We needed to read associated chapters and compare modern websites to them. Chapter 1 was focused 100% on the title- "don't make me think". With poorly designed websites, the user should be able to use a website from the get-go without having to have any explaining. If you don't succeed, your user has to ask him/herself things that shouldn't be thought about, such as "where is the search bar" or "where is ___". With this in mind we needed to hunt down websites and explain what may cause those questions on said website.

My supposed questions for the Olathe East homepage:

Where do I find a list of teachers? There isn't anything clearly defined for finding out how to contact a teacher that one may have missing work for, or a question.

 Where is the search bar? There is no clearly defined search area, and so if a user can't find what they are looking for they won't even be able to find the thing that could help them find what they are looking for.

My supposed questions for the Olathe East homepage: 

Where is a link to other sports/the school website? Having a website dedicated to their football is great, but what if the user didn't mean for this sport? There isn't any clear method of reaching the main OE site, nor any of their other athletics. 

 Is that magnifying glass a button?  In the top right their header features a random magnifying glass. Typical this signifies a search function, but there is no clear text box to search in, and the magnifying glass itself looks faded and almost like a background object.

My supposed questions for the Olathe East library homepage: 

Where is a link to the school website? Once again, there is an Olathe East affiliated website with no clear link for their school website. At least there is a clearly defined search bar, and it stands out from the rest of the site.

They have a twitter button, but what about Facebook? This is more of a personal gripe, but I am a user too, after all! They feature a button for e-mail and twitter, but there isn't anything for Facebook, which in my experience is more widely used then twitter is. If you have social media buttons, it's at this point a standard to include all of the main stream media options.

Paint Place

The Paint Place

For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work on a large project. In Wordpress, we needed to make our own website from scratch using a fresh download of Wordpress, using a customized theme and an original logo.

The Front Page

Logo 

For my logo, I started with this.

When I was brainstorming for ideas for a logo, I knew we needed to make a formal-ish logo for a formal-ish website, so I instinctively thought of Times as a font. But, everyone else does the same thing, and thus there are thousands of "formal" things that are in times new roman- it's become rather generic. So I figured I could make it unique from everything else while keeping the font. I thought about using paint chips, and viola, I'm using times new roman without being a copycat. From there, after peer suggestions, I re-aligned the words, removed the background, and came up with the final product.

Theme 

For my theme, I looked on wordpress for themes that used dark colors (to bring the color out of the logo) and when I found something I was happy with I created a child theme with it- in simple terms, I set-up my theme to have specific parts overwritten even if the theme is updated, without messing with the original theme. With a few modifications in order, including a new header (featuring the logo) and a new background (again, to bring the color out) I am very happy with the final product.

Front Page

Our front page needed to feature various posts for tips and tricks with painting (which was a problem for me since I didn't really know how painting needed any instructions) and a main post that was "sticky", or non-changing. With some (a lot of) obvious corner cutting, I managed to achieve the requirements.

The Pages

Store Location 

In a lapse of any ideas, I decided to go with humor rather then legitimate content. There isn't much else to say about this page other than I don't really know what else I could have put in here.

Brands 

For brands, rather then create multiple custom brands I decided to go with more humor and rely on some obvious fake and terrible clip art for "brands". With more copying and pasting for the illusion of legit content, of course.

Colors 

I didn't (and still don't) know how to name all the various colors of paint you could buy from anywhere, so I screen capped the page for HTML colors on w3schools for paints.

Inspiration 

The (regrettably) only page with some full, legit, content, I used stock photo websites featured in my previous blog post to grab pictures of rooms and file them into categories and galleries for display.

There are quite a few more galleries actually featured, but I think putting all of them here would be rather redundant, as they all follow the template presented above. I got the idea for doing "inspiration" like this from various other paint store websites with similar ideas, but without the formatting/amount of pictures. I think this works perfect for the tools I have available to me.

Learning Center

For the learning center I, to be perfectly honest, copied word for word content from a webpage for "painting for beginners" and then set all of the text as a link to that website (evading copyright laws like a boss) with some silly clip-art pictures added for effect. This way I also had pictures on each page of the website.

Conclusion 

(whoa! professional-y! scary!!)

Overall, if you ignore all of the fake content, I feel very happy and proud of what I have created. Something I will definitely take away from this is that I spent so much time on the webpages with the most original content and it really doesn't look like a lot of time was spent, so I should focus on perhaps making it half fake and half real for class projects that require content. This way I spend far less time and all pages look like they have an equal amount of content. If I had to make something similar I think I would focus more on finding a good theme to customize, and then do far more customization on it, to make it nice and unique. I would use a similar idea for the logo though; specifically, putting it in the middle of a header image and then putting complimentary graphics on the sides. I think that the content took the longest, and the theme was the quickest to get and adjust to make it better.

Wordpress

Wordpress is a wonderful program that helps you easily create and manage a blog-style website. It's open-source, based on PHP and is a content management system.

It has 2 websites, wordpress.com and wordpress.org. The com website is for actually getting Wordpress, and then the org website is for downloading themes, plugins and other additions for your Wordpress.

There are a LOT of websites that use Wordpress- as of January 2015 it's used by 23.3% of the top 10 million websites. In fact, it is used by well known websites such as Target, Glad, CNN, People and even Star Wars!

Something to note is that Wordpress is not the only content management system that websites use. Alternatives include things like PHPWiki, or Enonic.







Sources:
https://wordpress.org/hosting/
http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all/