CFAR Website Rationale

Not sure if I should submit this through Moodle, or I put it up as a blog, but here it is. This is about the Networked Media Production Assingment A.

I chose to Curate an Online Exhibition based on a selection of my Creative works. Due to the small amount of content featured on the website I was able to keep the navigation very simple.
To assist with this ease of navigation I provided indented menus on one of the main pages which lead to other works within that area.
To assist with presenting the photographic works on the website I used an API made in Yahoo Pipes, linking to a Set on my Flickr account.
On each page I did not provide a huge amount of explanation, this was so that in future I could add additional content at a later date as it would fit the same broad category.
This website has a very simple layout and design. This is mainly due to my lack of skill in the area but it also allows it to be accessed by mobile devices or various different browsers with relative ease.
The ease of coding has been enhanced by featuring notes within the coding.
The colour scheme is simple. If too many colours featured in the background the text would become more difficult to read.
I created Margins either side of the paragraphed text to enhance visual appeal, and to act as natural borders to the piece.
The navigation is featured towards the top of each page, as culturally that is where we are accustomed to seeing it. On the writing page, where there are additional links I decided to do them as a separated navigation section. This means that between all the pages the main navigation does not change.
The simplest was to give this unified feel to the website was to copy a large amount of the coding from one page into the next. Anyone using a page that clicked on a link and was catapulted into something with a very different look, would assume they’d left the original website.
I combated this with a great uniformity throughout the pages.
CSS also helped to create this unified feel. An issue I had with the way things were look could quickly and easily be changed in the CSS document and thus be applied to all pages.
Although this is a very simple website it is essentially a trimmed down version of most websites on the internet today. It has intentionally been written as the same basic layout that we have adopted culturally to allow users to instinctively know their way around.
The commonwealth bank website is in essence quite similar to the CFAR Website. Although the Commonwealth website is done with a much more visually interesting graphics, the basic layout design is the same i.e.

Top – Main Navigation
Bottom – Content and secondary navigation

Although basic, this layout has become quite intuitive through cultural exposure. Moving the main navigation to the bottom for instance, under the main content would confuse many people. They would also need to scroll past potentially pages and pages of content, potentially waiting for it to load before they could continue onto another page.