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.