Documentation of the Development Process
For this project I used my enjoyment of table top and board games. Gorilla Games Shop would sell boardgames, as well as instruction books to tabletop games, expansions, and accessories to the games that they sell. The shop also will hold game nights throughout the week, allowing for people to come in and play games. This will be open to longtime fans, though the focus is to bring in new players and potential customers to the store. In this regard the event calendar page could be seen as the most important page on the site. There are many different play styles for tabletop games, and they do not all mesh well together. Having these game nights will allow players to meet new people who might have a different or better style to the people they are already playing with, or might introduce them to games that better allow for their individual play style. My uncle truly enjoys tabletop games, and wants more people to enjoy them as well, and this website is a great way to get people interested in trying them.In order to meet these purposes, I chose to make a page for two popular games, one tabletop and one card. Dungeons and Dragons is a very popular tabletop game, and Munchkin a popular card game. I chose to include a video of people playing each of these games, which can show how fun these games can be, as well as be an introduction to the rules. I also included a search function that searches google for other games, unfortunately I cannot seem to get the functionality to work, bringing the user to the google search page, instead of searching for the entered term.
Defense of the Final Product
For the main page I placed the name of the game shop along the top of the page as a banner, clearly marking the website the user has found. Under this and along the left-hand side of the screen are the navigation options, for the different subpages of the site. This makes moving between pages simple. The contact information appears at the bottom of the page easily located by users. All of these pages will have this same basic setup, except that each subpage will have the page name at the top underneath the top banner. For the main color of the website I have chosen red. Red is a color that appears on the packaging of many board and tabletop games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, Settlers of Catan, and Monopoly. For aesthetical reasons I will also use some green to highlight certain things, as red and green are complimentary colors. The text is mostly black on a white background as these have the best contrast to be easily read, while some is green on white, for the contrast from the black. These combinations are simple, and the site has a simple and clean look using them. My main focuses on aesthetics for this website are readability and a clean look. The fonts are a major part of this aesthetic, and so the display font is Verdana, and the body font is Bookman. Verdana is designed to be a large font, and so using it for the headlines on each of the site pages makes them simple to read. The Bookman font on the other hand can be easily read in larger and smaller sizes, making it perfect for the main body text on each of the website’s sections. The videos I chose are fun and engaging, but serve the purpose of teaching the viewer the basics of the games being shown.
Opportunites for Improvement and Growth
The website can be expanded to include information about more games, with additional information such as the history of the game, and its appearance in popular culture. The largest issue I had was attempting to create the calendar page. I discovered that dynamic calendars are quite complex, with the CSS coding being quite long, as well as JavaScript being a necessary aspect of the coding. Unfortunately any of the already coded calendars I found I could not get to function. The use of an embedded Google calendar was the next obvious choice for a dynamic calendar. The next issue is the search function on the main page. It should take the user to a google search results page for the entered term, however it instead goes to a blank google search page. I am unsure of how to get this to function properly. In future updates, as more games are added, the search function can be limited to the website itself. Other changes that can be added, or that I wish I had time to add, would include a looking for group page, where people who are interested in playing a certain game, but do not have enough interested friends could post a request looking for other interested people to play. They could then request a time to come to the shop and play there, and if there is enough interest in a certain game, another game night could be scheduled for that game.
