Faaiza was in charge of the website's creation. We used wix to create our website as we didn't know how to use html. This made website creation much simpler as we already had a set template to choose from and we had to change things such as color and imagery. For example, the top of our home page looks like the image below.
But originally, this area looked like this..
As you can see. There are many differences between the two. Firstly, we changed the name to say 'Polygon productions' rather than the default 'Electricfilms'. Then we changed some of the default sub pages. For example. 'Development' became 'Cast+crew' and we completely removed the trailer page.
One of the most challenging aspects is creating a sense of branding and professionalism within the website. A way in which we did this was to utilize the 'feature films' section of the website. Here we decided to create five separate film poster with no reference to any actual films. Also, we changed the colors of our template to blue which is iconic of our documentary and postcard.
To add the illusion that the documentary was bigger than it actually is, which makes it look more professional. We created fake news headlines which reported on our product. This helps the website fit the conventions of a documentary website.
In terms of the cast and crew sections. We decided to add an interactive side to the website by creating a pop-up gallery, rather than just having the names and titles of those involved. This means that visitors can click the images to enlarge them. This means that they can also see who the people mentioned actually are.
In terms of the awards page. We simply had to change the colors slightly as the rest was fine. We made the colors fit with the rest of the page by making the text white and changing the background to the same shade of red used in other areas of the website.
We changed the original template in this case by changing words such as 'Visit us' and 'follow us' to simply include the link to our page for each website. We also changed the color a type of orange to the more familiar blue and white used earlier.
The about page originally contained no imagery, and nothing stood out from it, as it was all text of different sizes.
However, we decided to add imagery and reduce the amount of text, whilst also making the text that was there stand out more, by capitalizing the 'about' title. We also added our own quote which relates to the themes of our documentary.
For the contact page, we added another quote to make a purely informative page more enjoyable. We also made the title white and capitalized while changing the banner to the same light blue color. This page was also made to include our telephone and face numbers, and also our address. There is also a space for visitors to contact us directly and ask us questions.
For the films sections of the website. We were essentially required to describe the plot of BETA and what issues it would be discussing. However. We realized that we created several other film posters and must therefore create summaries for them as well in order to give them a sense of reality.
Originally the cast+crew page was a development page. And included films that would be released soon or films in production. However we decided to change this as we believe this page is more conventional of a documentary website. We changed the title at the top to say Cast + crew and we also included a message from our design. We included imagery of the production team with their names and titles to the side. And below we decided to also credit the cast, which included all the interviewees.
The behind the scenes subsection of the cast+crew page helps for audiences to relate to the production team of the documentary. As it shows them what went into creating the documentary that they will hopefully watch. This is a gallery of images that were taken of us filming and setting up in our film location. The gallery is interactive. Meaning visitors can switch between images without having to load a new image every time. This makes the entire website flow more smoothly.
The news section simply included events such as our attendance to film festivals and past achievements of the documentary. Which allows visitors to keep up with the latest information about the documentary.
The awards page was one of the view pages which only required minimal changes such as the color of the banner going from red to blue.
