A. Documentation of the Development Process Explain to your audience the intent and purpose behind this website. What steps did you take in creating the website that ensured you met your objectives?

The reason why I made this website was to advertise my uncles store to people who may not have heard about it. Hobby stores make the bulk of their money from running events for certain games. That’s why my first goal was to make an event calendar that was full of events. It was also important to let there be open times in the schedule so people can have the ability to bring any game they want and play with friends with family. I also wanted to have spaces in the schedule allotted to teaching newer people different games they may not have heard of before. Bringing in new people will allow for my uncles store to grow and expand. Also, by adding a contact us section to the website customers can now call in and schedule and event.

B. Defense of the Final Product Why did you make the specific design choices that you did? For each of your website’s pages, explain your rationale for the overall design, as well as the individual components (colors, typography, etc.). Support your choices with evidence of your consideration of the end user. What did you do to make your website engaging, professional, and easy to use?

When I started this project, I had a clear visual style I was shooting for. I wanted cool muted blues and greys for the website. The website looks nothing like I envisioned. While it does have some of the greys I planned on, like in the navigation bar and the body text, everything else is not to plan. The design for this website went through I number of revisions before I settled on the colors of brown, blue, and grey. While its still not my favorite looking color pallet there’s something about it when used on a website. In my experience seeing brown background website is rare. I think the colors with this website stick with after you leave the site.

The fonts I chose were a mix between Arial, Helvetica, and Calibri. All these fonts are sans serif to make it easier to read on the web. Aside from the event schedule I chose to avoid pure black and pure white. Both colors are offset a little. I feel like this choice leads to less strain on users’ eyes. I also made sure to make the navigation bar very large so people can quickly navigate from page to page.

C. Opportunities for Improvement and Growth Finally, explain what else you might like to do with this website in the future. What could you have done differently if you had more time or resources? What sorts of content, capabilities, pages, etc. might you want to include in future updates?

There is a lot more I would like to do with the website. I had a lot of shortcomings when it came to this project. I don’t know if overestimating my ability or not taking into account the amount of time I left myself. A lot of my time working on this site were for features that were never implemented. One of the features I really wanted to add was a gallery slide show for the products page. I spent awhile trying to get it working but I couldn’t finish it in time. I was also wanting to implement an animation for hovering over the different links in the nav bar. I’m disappointed in the logo too. I feel like its too small and it throws the whole site out of balance visually.

I have to give credit to my friends for helping me with the events table. This was by far the hardest task I had to put on the website. The table was my first goal for the site since its one of the most important features of the site. I told them the look I was going for and they offered a lot of advice and tips on how to achieve the look I was after. They showed some helpful YouTube videos and other references for this part.

The one thing I want to do with this site is to get it to work on GeoCities. I have followed a bunch of different videos on how to upload my files to site but none of them seem to work. For all the work that was put into this project this was probably the most upsetting and demoralizing.