My ultimate goal was to keep this website from becoming overly complicated. This website is to be used by my uncle to help show off his personal graphic design creations. Therefore, the coloring of the website should be simple and not distract or detract attention away from the Portfolio or the Image Gallery. I have gone through at least 10 different designs before I finally decided on using the simple gray and blue background. I feel like a lot of colors would pop with that background, which would royally benefit my uncle.

I definitely did not follow through with my original vision because I didn’t start working on this website until far later than I should have. Honestly, I believe I scrapped most of my original ideas. I tried really hard to stick to my original color scheme, but having only one bright color and two dull ones was rather difficult to keep track of, so I had to add some more dull colors.

When it comes to steps, I just sort of kept checking my web pages, to make sure that they all flowed nicely and looked ok with whatever background I was using at the time. Flow is important and I couldn’t make one page look awesome, but the others look boring and lackluster.

As a graphic design website, I had to let the artwork speak for itself. In that sense, the background and layout of the website had to be simple, so the artwork could shine.

Homepage – I wanted the homepage to be just the simple introductory page. Not too much but not too little. I gave myself a specific style guide that I adhered to throughout the page. The colors I chose, #0000ff (blue), #fffbaf (light yellow), and #ceffaf (light green) are shown on the page, displayed in a way that it makes sense and is easy on the eyes of the users. I decided to add a short News section, to show that the website is current and I made it green, so it stands out against the gray background. I also added a short section that identifies who my uncle is and why he has his own website.

Portfolio - I made this part of the website stand out because it doesn't follow the same flow as the rest of the webpages. I didn't want the portfolio, the legit images that have been used in successful businesses, to be compared to the image gallery because of their importance. The images on this page are valid and cannot be recreated by anyone unless they hold the rights to the images and as such, they should stand out above the rest. I still think they're easy to see and the website is easy to navigate. Users can also click on the images to get a better view of them, to see all of the details and such. I wanted to keep this page as simple as possible and I believe I succeeded.

Image Gallery – For the image gallery, I wanted to show off simple works of art that people could identify with. It shows what my uncle enjoys doing. I made the images scrollable, so that a user could go through them at their own pace but I also made it timed, so that the images change every 6 seconds, to add some pizzazz. I also added some additional information to the images that are shown in the image gallery, so that the users could hear stories as to why or how these personal creations came about. I think it slightly engages with the users, because it’s like my uncle is directly speaking to them. I also added a tutorial video at the bottom of this page. The video I added specifically uses Photoshop and it shows their own personal technique on how they created specific well-known characters that I believe flows nicely with the image gallery. I wanted to show off the creations so I kept the layout and style of the page extremely simple by having everything in either black or blue text.

Social Media – For this page, I decided to change things up a little bit. Every page I had was either mostly text or mostly images. For this page, it was going to be nothing but text and I thought that would be rather boring for a graphic design website. I decided to add some creations that my uncle made to the beginning of each section, making sure that the colors used was of the chosen blue, yellow, and green variety. I placed the images inside of a shadow box, to spice up the images a bit and make them stand out more. I think this page was all about engaging with users and explaining why they should also follow him on his other sites, along with his personal website. I even included ‘direct’ links to his other pages, so the users wouldn’t have to go out of their way to search and find him. I think that makes this page relatively easy to use because they see exactly what site they should follow and how to follow it.

Prices – I added more color to this page than the others because I felt like this page was feeling rather-lackluster without it. I went with the green for the table because the yellow seemed to be too bright, but I did add the yellow to the hover functionality. The website directly engages with the user because of the Javascript submit button. When the user presses the submit button, there’s a pop-up box that verifies if the user wants to log in or not. When the user presses ‘ok’ or ‘cancel’, text appears on the screen that says exactly what they chose to do. The table itself makes it easy to understand because users can hover over the Package they’re interested in and not lose track of which package they’re reading thanks to the hover color. It also specifically shows if an item is on Sale, so users can decide if they want to wait until a new Sale time period begins or not.

If I was to actually use this website, but keep it in the graphic design world, I would like to add actual content that is meaning and good. Most of these images were done within 5 minutes, just so I had something to fill the website with. I wish I had more time to actually dedicate to the images since that was the whole point of this website, to begin with. Perhaps I could have scanned my actual drawings and used them in place of my quick Photoshop images.

To update this webpage, I think it would be nice to add an actual blog section, where my uncle could blog about whatever he wanted. As the website stands now, he can only really update the News section but to expand upon the website, I would add a new blog page, solely dedicated to his blogging. It could include videos, images, text stories, anything that a normal blog would include. I also think it would be nice to have a unique background that is created solely for this website. One that isn’t just random lines going across the screen.