Finishing touch!

Hi Guys!

We've decided to give our website a bit of a re-vamp because we thought it wasn't meeting it's full potential and little bits here and there could be tweaked to make it of a better standard.

We now have several pages including Dogs, Missing Pets, Chicken Run, (Interesting) Animal Stories, Horse Stories and so on, all of which are very exciting and interesting. Some have a/many stories on them and others are listed with images and details, we thought this would attract our target audience of children as it has a variety and is interesting. We have several pictures with nice bold borders too!

On our main home page all pages are easily accessible to, there is a slide show of which also has 6 slides which has our Owner of the Week, Twitter updates and even our News Channel Opening Title Sequence on it which gives the audience the opportunity to look at it and give us feed back. Everything also has a 'Read More' button on it of which links onto the actual page and allows you to gain more information on a certain story/topic/page.

Not to forget... We have even managed to add on some Advertisement! As you will probably see on our main home page there is an 'Animal Planet' advert and hopefully we may be able to find a few other places where we can add more such as Bakers Complete Dog Food, Iams and so on - fingers crossed, we might be lucky!

Last but not least the website also has a Gallery of which obtains several photos of animals, all domestic including dogs, cats, horses, rabbits and so on.
We think all in all our new website has the wow-factor of which attracts our target audience of children as it is bold and eye catching. It is fun looking, colourful and is a place with interesting stories, facts and keeps you up to date on missing pets etc. We hope our target audience like it and we look forward to receiving feed back. We have put hard work and effort into this and hope the change in colour, borders etc will have a positive affect!

--- screen shots ---

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

"The Salmon is killing me"

"The Salmon is killing me!"
As a group I think we came to terms that the Salmon just wasn't doing it for us, although a nice colour and went with our website it was just too awkward looking...
We looked through the 'background' colours available and found a nice, calm and clean Mint colour which we concluded suited our website best alongside all the other baby colours we had such as blue, yellow and pink.

We listened to ourselves and went forward with the new colour which fits perfectly!

COMPARISON!

Here is our website finally coming together, obviously you can see the huge difference between the 'in your face' Salmon and 'nice attractive' Mint. We are so happy with our decision and hope our target audience of children like it too! It's a huge transformation and in our opinion definitely works well!

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie. 

New Page!

We have decided to take a new adventure on our RAFA news website. As a team we decided to add a new page, this being 'ANIMAL STORIES'. Here we will be keeping you updated on new interesting stories based on domestic pets such as a horse who eats doughnuts and a dog who likes vegetables and so on.

We are excited to take this project further as this it will be a key point on our website for our target audience of children. We were inspired by the CBBC website which has a similar page like this.

 We have a new page called 'ANIMAL STORIES'! This page will be linked with the colour pink, many interesting animal stories can be found here, ALL BEING DOMESTIC PETS! :)

Here is a quick screen grab of the 'ANIMAL STORIES' page, there is a lot more editing and adapting to be done including more stories and new photos etc. Although we have done quite a lot in the short amount of time we have had. Be patient and you won'tbe disappointed!

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

It's all coming together!

Hi there,

Finally our website making is coming to an end! We have finally managed to get somewhere after many difficulties. We feel that our new website is much more suitable to our target audience which is children. The website template is layed out in a way which is easy for children to read and understand with  many kiddy features. We also chose bright colours which makes the website look bold and stand out so that it is not a boring news website like many others.

The background colour of our website is 'Salmon' so that it is quite bright and gives a positive feel to it. On this main homepage we will be placing our RAFA logo in the top left corner so that it is easily seen by everyone as to what 'news channel' we are. We have a variety of different tabs that page viewers can click on to read certain stories linked on different pages for example; Horse Facts, Gallery, Missing Pets, Chicken Run and more interesting stories. However people will also get a chance to read shorter version of each story on our homepage so that they can see if they take an interest to reading it or not, these mini stories are shown both on the main homepage and a slide show we have put together too.

Each of our stories have been set a different colour so that our website will be colourful and people will know when they see each colour which story it is set for, the colours we have used are 'baby colours' ie. blue/green and pink. As a group we feel that our website is now suitable and the right style for children to easily read.

Here's another quick screen grab of our website coming into place! As stated above each story is given a different colour ie. 'HORSE FACTS' is baby blue, 'CHICKEN RUN' is peach/orange and 'OWNER OF THE WEEK' is baby yellow. We also have a tabs board listed above which is another way of navigating away off of the home page. There's more to come guys!

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

Follow us!

We have now made a twitter account so that people can follow us! Our twitter name is @Rafa__News. On twitter we will be posting facts, news and pictures all about animals and our website.

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

Finally, progression!

Hi there,

We finally have progressed from our last post, we sat around the school computer again with the hope for it to work alongside us. We looked through our selected templates for the last time to decide on our chosen website design and successfully so the work begun! We all begun discussing where everything should be placed including text boxes, titles, pictures and so on. We went through all the stages we had previously done once again to come to a full final agreement with the website and how it was going to be presented to others.

Kenneth has decided to take the website home which he intended on doing so with our previous website and will be using our ideas to hopefully complete as much as possible, we'll soon have to get out and about to get some photos which will work alongside our website! We we will be taking our photos in a variety of different locations including local livery yards, parks and even on the school site!

We look forward to keeping you posted with the making of the site!

He is a quick screen grab of part of our website, we have managed to make a 'slide show' where many little stories will be listed, including 'Owner of the Week' and many others! Currently we have a dull white background but not for long ;)

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

More technical difficulties!

Hi there,

Unfortunately we have seem to have gone through some severe technical difficulties once again with the school computers. We have lost our whole website as it seems to have apparently not have saved! We are very disappointed and upset however we hope to make an even better website with a brighter, bolder website template using our previous ideas including colours/themes and story lines!

We have sat down to discuss and look through another large selection of website designs and will be discussing over the next lesson which one suits best and then the work begins! Kenneth will be working on the website at home alongside lesson time where we will also be contributing our personal opinions throughout the making.

We look forward to now making another website due to the technical issues we have gone through! :)

Obviously due to loosing our previous website we had to look at another wide range of website designs on 'WIX.COM', this time we decided to look under a wide variety of different catergories rather than just 'Vets & Pets', we successfully found a wide amount and then agreed on 1 specific one we thought went best with our news package idea.

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

Website making!

Hi there,

We started producing a website for our News Channel, RAFA. We had to create a website which had a news like layout and was eye catching and bold. We had to include several different stories based on animals and had to attract our target audience of children. As a group we sat around one of the school computers and looked at the website templates available. We picked out a large amount of templates we liked and then discussed further which one we liked most and thought would fit in appropriately.

Having gone through quite a few technical issues we eventually managed to re-focus ourselves with hope that the computer would no longer play up! We picked a bright, nice template which we then discussed upon what would be placed where and what we would have on it, we concluded to add a story regarding the school chickens, list a wide amount of horse facts, make an article based on dogs and whether they are vicious our not (i.e. how they are portrayed and looked upon) and so on. We also discussed a colour scheme of blue/white and black.

We begun editing placing everything in order according to how we wanted it, we linked pages together and also made 'read more' boxes which would navigate you away from the page. We used our knowledge in page layout via looking through several other news channel website such as CBeebies, BBC and so on which inspired us to layout our website in an attractive form. When designing the page we also agreed on placing a large amount of animal based photographs around the website including a possible slide show.

We're looking forward to completing our website hopefully soon and having a nice eye catching and bold site which is attracted towards our target audience.

Here are a few screen grabs of the website page layouts that we found interest in. We are creating a website on 'WIX.COM' where a wide variety of templates are provided underneath different categories, 1 catergory which helped us was specifically was 'Vets & Pets' because ours was based around domestic animals.

As seen we looked at a variety of different NEWS CHANNEL websites to give us ideas including BBC, CBBC and ITV NEWS. 

Here is a screen shot showing what we can do with the 'READ MORE' buttons, we have the ability to navigate page viewers away onto different pages through clicking the 'Link' option which list the pages we have available, alongside this we can also change style, colour and format text.

Thanks!

Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

Analysis of News Websites

Whilst planning our website we decided to research further into depth other news websites to give us an idea of how to set it out and inspiration so that it would suit our target audience perfectly. We looked at CBBC News round, BBC News and ITV News to guide us through the process of making our News Channel Website. 

CBBC News round was one of our main inspirations when desgining and producing our news channel website, we thought the layout was good and eye catching and specifically desgined for the younger generation (our target audience). We admired how the stories were set out with the main being at the top and the largest with other interesting stories underneath which we took into consideration, alongside this we also specifically liked the quizzes/competition which were on the right hand side of the page which we thought had a great impact on children.

One more thing we really liked about the CBBC News round website were the buttons at the top of the page, we thought they were bold and effective each one having it's own colour when hovered over which we thought was very impressive! 

ITV News was another website we looked at however didn't find very interesting, the website is mainly based for the older generation of which we are not concentrating on therefore didn't come into very much use. Whilst skimming through there site we realized that all news stories were just simply listed with a brief summary underneath which once again didn't appeal to us at all however one thing we did think was excellent was the Twitter updates, Twitter being something continuously used by the younger generation alongside other social networking sites such as Facebook we thought it would be excellent if we made our own account and so we did (@RAFA_NEWS). Having been inspired by this we decided to put this into our website too so now we just need to begin making it! 

 

BBC News was one of the last news channel websites we looked at, once again we weren't appealed to there layout as it was based at the older generation again however we did take into account the layout slightly, we liked the fact that the main story was the largest with a brief summary next to it and then the 2 other latest stories were underneath but smallest, we thought this was nice and eye catching in some aspects therefore took it into consideration. We also liked how there were various other stories on the right hand site listed with very small sentences about what they were about. We took as much into account as we could which we thought would contribute towards making our website and now the fun begins! 

Thanks!

Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

Our complete News Channel Opening Title Sequence :)

Hi Guys!

Here's the finished product of our news channel projects opening title sequence :)
We hope you like it! Obviously as you can see it is quite 'kiddy' going perfectly with our target audience of kids.

Thanks!
Team; Kenneth - Natalie.

Finishing touch to our News Channel Opening Sequence.

Finally we've been reunited and the work begins in finishing our News Channel opening title sequence. As a team we walked around the school at lunch and gathered a small amount of children ranging from Year 7 - 11, we took them to the Media Department and then got them to jump in the air and shout RAFA whilst we filmed them. After 2 attempts we got the perfect clip which we put onto the school computers straight away and edited where's neccessary. Once on our opening title sequence we added in a flash to white and our News Channel Logo, successfully so everything was coming together! All that was left was very minimal, we had to cut down where the clip was repetative and boring alongside the music although this was easily amended within no time :)

   

Here is a sequence of our completed News Channel Opening Title Sequence, all clips are layered on top and we have also added in the kids jumping int he air and a flash to white alongside our News Channel Logo.

Thanks!

Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.

CHANGE!!!

As a group we decided we would change and adapt our News Channel opening title sequence. We decided our previous opening title sequence wasn't up to our standards and didn't show our true potential. Due to this we decided to start from scratch. We put together a large selection of ideas on a peice of paper and then discussed our favourite idea. Once we had picked the idea we liked the most we started to create a new storyboard on paper. We did this so that we could get a clue as to how our opening sequence would look before creating it on Adobe Premiere. Instead of having a montage of the animals, we decided to layer them and make them all come out onto one screen. Each animal would show up one by one with a fade effect. At the end all the animals would be on the screen at the same time. The ending has however not been completed yet due to unforeseen circumstances of one member being ill, we did not want to continue making the opening title sequence without her voicing her opinion. We are now waiting for her to come back to complete our opening title sequence with her added opinion.

Here is a picture of our complete story board which helped us produce our news channel opening title sequence!

Here is a picture from Adobe Premier showing the making of our News Channel Opening Sequence, to produce our grid like format we had to layer each clip on top of each other and then minimize the size to place on the same screen.

Thanks!

Team; Kenneth - Emma - Natalie.