Research science fiction Essay

During the summer I met up with Harinder to start building our website and to get an idea of what it would include and look like. We decided to use the program Dream Weaver since it was more flexible compared to word or Frontpage and it had many features that we could use for our website, such as different backgrounds and texts. Dream weaver enabled us to use Flash MX which has much more effective graphics which we couldn’t get on Front Page such as the flash buttons and 3-d backgrounds all to make our website suit the Sc-Fi theme. We targeted our audience immediately by choosing the theme Science Fiction which appeals to teen and young adult males. We kept the audience involved furthermore by the type of language we chose to use which wasn’t too complicated yet not too patronising. The set up of the page was kept colourful, yet formal, by not having the hyperlinks and pictures all over the page. It would therefore appeal to the younger and older generations of our audience. We also targeted the audience by adding more features to our website like voting and a guest book so they feel welcome and give feed back on what they thought of our website. The strengths and weaknesses of our production are fairly clear. Some of the strengths are that it appeals to a wide range of audiences which means that more people are attracted to our website and it would be popular. Another strength would be the different kinds of features that make up our website, from the different types of flash buttons to the backgrounds, wallpapers and pictures. The weaknesses of our website include the appearance of the homepage; it looks too cluttered at the top then too empty at the bottom. The colours don’t match especially with the different coloured buttons. Another weakness would be that on a page like the picture page all of the links are down on one side of the page and the rest of the page looks empty. We could have avoided this problem by putting more pictures and links on the page. One more weakness I could pick out would probably be that it takes quite a long time to load up the site. This could be put down to the fact that there is a lot of links and features on our webpage which slows down the connection and makes it harder for the computer to find the proxy settings. The responses from our target audience were good. We asked people between the ages of 15-30 years of age what they thought of our website. We got some good responses especially from the younger members of our audiences, such as the layout of the website and the features is good quality. They did offer some improvements, such as it needed more information put into the site. The point came up again that the home page was too cluttered and looked over crowded. The older generation of our audience also thought the site was very effective. Some proposed improvements were that we needed to take more care when writing the movie reviews since there was a lot of spelling mistakes. Also that some of the other pages seemed empty with only a few links on them. It was proposed we should have either not made a links page for the pictures page or made more links and pictures. Another improvement suggested that we should have made our website even more formal if we wanted to aim at a wider range of 25 year olds upward, by not having the colourful buttons or backgrounds but having them black and white. I feel I learnt that we needed to have deadlines between ourselves to get certain things finished and then move on to the next thing instead of going back and finishing off pictures or reviews. You need to have people in your group that you can rely on to have work finished and handed in. Appendix 1. Google – Search Engine 2. Science Fiction Websites- * Sci-fi.com * Sciencefic.com * Science Fiction Movie Reviews Pages * Science Fiction Picture Pages 3. Ask- Search Engine 4. Lycos- Search Engine