Web Design Techniques

Assignment 4 report

Mark Brady

The website which I decided to create was a fan website for the Final Fantasy series of video games. I decided to name the site, Super Final Fantasy Site 58, this name may seem a trifle unusual, but it corresponds with my sense of humour online. There are many Final Fantasy fan websites in existence, probably more than any other video game series, so original website names are rather hard to concoct.

My performance in creating the website was in hindsight, imperfect. Thinking back I approached the task of producing the website with a certain degree of arrogance. I have in the past done a few different web design part time courses, which I learnt a large amount of knowledge from, skills such as CSS, JavaScript, XML, etc etc. Had I practiced my skills, it would be well within my ability to produce highly professional websites and pages. Due to the fact that I had not, I have forgotten many of my former skills over time

I had an excellent idea of how I wished the website to appear. I have designed a few Final Fantasy websites before, generally as part of web design projects. None of the previous websites however have been implemented as fully-fledged websites, so to speak. These previous designs have given me an excellent image in my mind of how I want a Final Fantasy website to appear, feel and function. I found the paper-based designs rather useful in confirming my design on paper. However they were not too useful due to the fact that I have the complete site design in my head. I imagine paper based designs would be extremely useful if I was producing a website that I was unfamiliar with, particularly if I was designing a website for a client or if I was perhaps producing a website for a subject I am not so familiar with, etc.

The piece of software which I used for this website project was Microsoft FrontPage. I chose FrontPage because I have a good level of familiarity with the software and I have used it often in the past. I am also rather adapt in the use of Macromedia Dreamweaver, however the college PC's which I have access to typically do not include this application.

FrontPage is rather advantageous due to the fact that it is a Microsoft Office application. It is rather easy for a beginner user to pick up, requiring little instruction, the application also has many advanced functions too. FrontPage is particularly useful in its compatibility with CSS. I have not made use of CSS in my website currently, although I have studied it to a fair degree. I mainly decided not to use it due to time constraints and the fact that over time I have become unfamiliar with CSS.

FrontPage can often be at times a disadvantage to professional users. Many web designers prefer to design sites solely by writing their own html. I myself would be more than capable to perform this task, but I chose not to generally because of "laziness" you could say. FrontPage also increases the file sizes due to the fact that it generates a rather large amount of unnecessary html code. I do personally find it to be significantly easier and of course faster, to design web pages in a graphical user interface (GUI) format. If Super Final Fantasy Site 58 were to be developed further, then the software used would most likely be reconsidered. Perhaps a shift to Dreamweaver or even just develop the site using the “raw code” in Notepad.

In each of the WebPages I made use of tables, typically with two rows and two columns. I used this feature to partition the main body of text and the hyperlinks to the other pages, and also from the page banner. I had made use of tables in a similar way in previous websites that I have made but this time I made the tables invisible. I feel that this was a good touch because it did not cause the table boarders to interfere with the page background colour. Tables are perhaps generally ideal for this form of website, I could have perhaps made use of frames but they can be problematic to include in WebPages and are regarded by many as being old fashioned. Frames can also prevent the user from directly obtaining the link to a particular webpage, which would prove most annoying if a user wished to send a link to a particular page to someone else.

I made use of animated gifs, mostly for aesthetic reasons. In each of the pages I included two character gif images. I feel these greatly added to the aesthetic feel of each page and functioned rather well as “corner stones” in each page so to speak. Their size in dimensions was not too excessive, while remaining small enough not to be an “eyesore” to those browsing the website, they were big enough to easily be visible to users. Their file size is also very small, so they would have a low level of impact on the time taken for the pages to load.

I took advantage of two features, a counter and a guestbook, from an Internet company known as Bravenet who provide a wide range of tools for websites. This service can be rather advantageous for budding young web designers, as features such as chat rooms and forums can be included with little or no technical knowledge required on the part of the user. Their main disadvantage however are that the services typically come with some form of advertisements for Bravenet or other companies, unless the user were to become a paying member. I didn’t use any more of their services due to the fact that I didn’t wish to have more of their advertising on my pages. I was rather tempted to include a chat room provided by their site but I decided against it at this stage, not including one until the website has a large enough user base.

For the image galleries, it was inconceivable to have the image displayed at full size. Many of the images are desktop wallpaper; their full size in dimensions would alter the appearance of the page in the users browser and also make it clumsy to navigate. Even on a fast connection, all the wallpapers on one page would have a problematic loading time too. To counter this problem, I have made use of thumbnails on my website. Due to this, the gallery pages have a much faster loading time, the user can choose at leisure which image they wish to view then click it to view it full size.

Integral to many video game fansites is a forum/message board. For Super Final Fantasy Site 58, I have created a message board for the site on my Super Bread forums. This will likely be most advantageous, as it will help the site to gain a community, which a typically major factors in the success or failure of a video game website. The community itself would help to “spread the word” about the website and help to get more visitors and forum members.

As I have mentioned, there are indeed a great deal of Final Fantasy websites in existence. I would venture that this is generally unique to the Final Fantasy series, there are many other video game fansites but few other games have so many websites. The quality of the websites varies a fair deal, there are many professional sites such as Fantasy Square, or FFOnline, but there are also many “small-time” websites hosted on sites such as Angelfire and Geocities.

One such website I am highly familiar with is called Fantasy Square (http://www.fantasysquare.com). I would class this website as a professional one, although they are non-profit and they give their profits to charity I believe. This website is very professional, it offers features such as a shop that sells a wide range of Final Fantasy merchandise. They also have a wide range of information on the game, such as information on the mythology relating to the game. It would be pretty much unfeasible for me to introduce features like a shop to my website as it would take a great deal of time and effort both to implement and to maintain. Other information like the mythology I could implement however, but I would be required to be most cautious to avoid plagiarism on this matter.

As many Final Fantasy websites are blocked by the college’s questionable firewall, it is limited as to the websites I can compare to my one. Watery Eyes is one such website that I have been able to access, (http://wateryeyes.tripod.com/finalfantasyx/). This is an amateur website produced using Tripod, so it would indeed be a good example to compare with my own. The website is small and appears to be under construction, unlike my website it has less media (such as images etc). I like its design, it makes use of JavaScript to alter the toolbars and the cursor.