Q1. In What Way Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

Our website is for the fictional charity "Babies in need". It supports young children at more of a disadvantage than any other children. Using conventions of the genre, it looks fairly convincing as a professional campaign site.

The first thing you notice when viewing our website is the colour scheme as it stands out most of all. We used bright colours to attract the female audience and represent the issue. Our society associates these bright pastel colours with children and childhood so like professional sites, we had thought about the connotations of our colour design. The logo below demonstrates this effecive use of colour however we recognise that we could have added a few more layer styles to the logo in PhotoShop to make it look more professional. We could've used a slight drop shadow for instance to lift the logo from the page so it didn't look so flat.

Images were very important to our campaign site and these are central to the iconography of all campaign sites. Four images have been used of children smiling, at different ages, signifying that our charity has helped make these children happy. We have also used a video on the site to add interest but this could have been encoded with more meaning, linked to an event perhaps or a true story with testimonials.

Another convention of all websites in the navigation bar and ours has been placed vertically on every page, in the same position, so that visitors on the site can get around easily and very importantly, find key information and how to donate. What makes a charity site stand apart from other sites in terms of genre is the labels on those navigation bars - the campaign site will conventionally have, 'donate' and 'how you can get involved' or 'events'. To add interest to our navigation bar we used multi-coloured rollovers which would help the site visitor keep track of where they are on the page and also make it more interesting as an experience.

"http://www.childreninneed.co.uk/ " was the website we based our design and ideas on. Our media product is not quite at the level of a professional site such as "children in need" but we feel that we have used conventions of the genre effectively to make our site recognisable as firstly a website and secondly a campaign site. It also meets audience expectations because it can be navigated easily and all the links work demonstrating effective design and IT skills.


In my point of view "Babies in need" does not challenge conventions of the genre because the site needs to fulfill a specific objective which is to raise money and awareness. If we were to play around with conventions we would not be making an accessible site for our target audience who are expecting a traditional site. If the site was for teenagers we would be able to experiment a little more but we had to be 'safe' n our design to ensure we met our brief.

Website Distribution

Web Hosting -
Web hosting is a type of internet service that allows individuals or organisations to make a website and for it to be accessable through the World Wide Web. They provide a server as well as internet connectivity in a data centre. Web hosts can also provide internet conectivity for servers they do not own in their data centre, called colocation.

Domain Name -
A domain name is a an identification label that defines a realm of authority or control on the internet, based on the Domain Name System (DNS). Domain names are also used as simple identifications that are easy to remember to numerically addressed internet resoures. This allows the website to be moved to a different location globally, on a local intranet or in a network.

Survey Results and Audience Profile

Figure seven - Most Popular Charity?

Figure eight - How often do you read newspapers?

Figure Five - Gender

Figure Six- Relationship Status

Figure Three - Nationality

Figure Four - How much do you earn a year?

Figure Two - What are the websites viewed for?

Figure One - Popular Websites

Our survey results will help us to choose which charity to produce, from our results we see that most people would donate their money to 'Children In Need' so we based our ideas around that.

BBC and Facebook were the most viewed and popular websites so we will making 'Babies In Need' accessible through both of these websites, fundraising events will also be posted.

The Mirror is the most popular viewed newspaper so we will advertise or get some coverage in this newspaper as this would raise awareness of our charity. Females were shown to view charity websites more than men, so we have planned our colour scheme to target women more than men.

survey

website analysis

Website Brief

Louisa and I have named our charity 'Babies In Need', based around 'Children In Need'. We will use colourful layouts, with multicoloured page links, and rollovers, also a multicoloured title and a bold 'donate' button that attracts people who visit the website.

Looking at the website for 'Children In Need' we noticed that they have the same 3 column layout on every page, so we used that idea to make our website look more professional. They also used the background, different coloured polkerdots to look more inviting to children, their colour scheme is based around these colours which we have also used for our colour design.

We will photograph Louisa's baby sister with her parents permission, at different ages to make her look like different children. We will use lots of photos on every page to attract an audience and represent the children which the charity is helping. This will be a persuasive technique to communicate to the audience that 'babies in need' is making a real difference in their lives.

Functionally, our website will be easy to navigate with carefully labeled hyperlinks, such as the donate button shown below, which links to the contacting page giving ways of donating easily, also the details.

Louisa and I designed this using Photoshop and made it so it would stand out and attract people to the donate button. A bold font in capital letters draw in visitors to our charity and make them donate to us.

We will have 4 pictures of babies on the right hand side who we've helped thanks to our charity. The title is very bright and bold too. And the 'please donate' button is very bold to try to persuade people to donate. The pages on the left have all been colour coded to the colours in the title. We chose to have all different colours as this to us suggests babies and shows a happy atmosphere that we wanted to portray with the website. We chose to have all text in plain light grey boxes as its a simple and easy design. simple designs without harsh outlines can make the big difference to our website, we learnt this second time round after creating our preliminary website that didn't look real.

Review of Media Studies

When I first started the course I quickly became familiar with what it was that we would be studying and took a great interest in it.

I had a faint idea of what we might come across in the course such as the study of films, adverts, magazines and newspapers. Also the breaking down of what films include, the complexity of music, stunts, shots of the camera and the way the camera moves.

The first piece of media we studied was Hollyoaks, this went well for me and I felt I had a general good idea of how things were constructed in the series. Creating my storyboard was the most successful chapter of work but writing the assessment came across as more of a challenge and this is one peice of work that I would like to show more understanding in, take more time on

or edit some parts of it.

After watching parts of the DVD Casino Royale, I have understood the detail and effort that goes into completing a film and how complex the music and sound was for this film. Also how sound is sometimes diagetic and the actors can't always hear what the audience can hear. This is to make the scene have more emotion for us as an audience.

Gone Fishing is also a short film which we also studied as a class. I was most impressed with the camera work and how such a simple film could become famous around the world considering how short it was.