Advanced Skills Workshops

The Advanced Skills Workshop that I attended was ‘Design Principles for the Web’. I have a keen interest in web design so I was really looking forward to this workshop as a way to develop my ability to design the elements of a web page before coding them. Miek Dunbar, a freelance web and interaction designer, conducted the workshop and covered a range of different methods to use when mapping out a website. The method that I found most helpful and will definitely utilise in my own practice involved sketches called ‘wireframes’. Wireframes are simple, usually black and white hand drawn sketches of all web page in a website. They are act similarly to storyboards in a movie in that they ensure that all of the necessary elements of the web page are plotted within the aspect ratio of a computer screen, and they also ensure consistency between all of the pages within a site. During the class I drew a number of wireframes to a fictional website brief that I created just for the exercise, and learnt that although the exercise sounded simple enough it took me over ten attempts to achieve a wireframe that I was happy with. I found that although one layout might have worked well for the homepage, it might not have been appropriate for the other pages of the site and so would have failed to maintain an element of consistency throughout the different pages. This realisation will prove to be very helpful when designing web pages in the future. Previously I used to just go straight to Photoshop and create the different visual elements of a web page without really drawing out the layout to consider how the elements will interact with each other over a number of different pages. Incorporating this process into my practice will allow me to create websites that are more aesthetically appealing. It will also help my webpages to become more functional because it allows me to consider where elements like the navigation bar should sit so that they can be easily accessed without impeding on the content within the body of the web page.
I would love to be able to display my PP2 documentary on The Social Studio online within its own webpage so that it can be publicly accessed and shared, and this knowledge will help me in the process of designing a website that can appropriately display a visual documentary.

Another skill that I took away from this workshop was the ability to create a good site map. As Miek explained, a site map is a tree diagram of all of the different pages of a website, and is essential to be being able to understand how the different pages relate to each other. It graphically displays the different access points and is extremely helpful in managing a large website with a lot of content on it. I’ve previously drawn site maps when creating my own websites, however Miek gave me a few really good tips that I will take away to improve my practice. He taught me to differentiate between the different pages on a site map that will be static and remain the same, and those that act more like ‘buckets’ and will have forever changing content. For example, the homepage of a website usually changes to update content and highlight new activity. This tip will help me  in the future to manage websites more efficiently, because I can now use a site map to instantly tell which pages I will need to keep updating weekly and which ones I can leave without checking constantly.