Evaluation

14/05/2019 - At this point in my project I am very glad that I changed my idea to making a website instead of making the game as I feel that I would not have gotten as far if I didn't change my idea. I have started my research by creating a questionnaire and I have also determined my target audience which has allowed me to plan my website design and how the pages are going to flow. To achieve the requirements of my final major project, I will conduct more research and add more references as I need a few more to make sure that all of resources and research is correct and relevant. Towards the end of my project, I would like to have created a product that I will be able to use both in and out of college as well as hopefully be able to keep and edit whenever I need to in the future. It will be used for my freelance work as well as my own personal creations and adventures.

03/06/2019 - Currently, I am extremely pleased with the way that my website has turned out. It displays all of the information that I need to share with my clients and target audience, I have also been given feedback that says that my website "looks professional and all the information presented is well thought through and kept short to keep the audience's attention." This is useful to me as I can see that my website is working and is achieving the success I was hoping my website would achieve. As well as this, I also got feed back on my showreel which suggested I "re-shoot" the scenes because not all of the clips that included are "good quality" - this is really good criticisms in my opinion as I knew that the showreel is short and I didn't have much to add to it because this is my first year of college. Although I have ran out of time to film more clips for my showreel, I will definitely that this feed back and use it in my future - when I hopefully have nice, good quality footage that I will be able to add.

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Evaluation:

At the end of the deadline, I have completed a freelance website that I can use for my future work and experiences with clients or personal work. This means that the website is practical to me as it is not something that I will forget about as I will be constantly updating it to make sure that it appeals to clients. I think the task of making a website was suitable for me as not only was I interested in learning more, and becoming, a freelancer, I also enjoy making websites and graphics for the sites - I was also interested in learning more about Wix as I have not used it up until this project. Because of this fact, I believe I had set myself a do-able task which was made even more fun when I added elements to the final product such as making a Facebook page dedicated to my company, “CFEM Production”. Paired with the short showreel and print advert that I have made to promote my website and the experience that I have. If there was anything that I could alter now it would be the quality of the showreel, I want to change this because the visuals are grainy and out of focus at times and I feel that they could be a lot better to make my showreel a more convincing piece when my clients come to look at it.

In my research, I investigated two other freelancers 
(Philip Bloom and Vincent Laforet) who helped me narrow down what elements and information I should incorporate into my website – such as a portfolio and an ‘about’ page. Vincent Laforet was the main inspiration when I created my 'about' page as his was simple but informative. For example, he had a photo of himself on the left has side followed by a few short, information filled paragraphs on the right hand side. I implemented this idea into my own website to test what it looked like and if it suited my website. I feel that it works well and compliments my website as I explain what I do, where I'm from and what I can offer. Additionally, to implement an aspect of my own, I created a "hover" layer to my photo on the right hand side so that when the audience hovers over it, there is a blue layer that displays my social media as well as my role. As well as this, looking at the templates on Wix helped me find a template that would suit my needs best - which is how I found the template by Elijah Louis. From the three templates that I looked at, my peers said that they prefer the Elijah Louis design because of the "separated sections", they didn't like the other choices because they looked too "basic" with the individual photo background.

My target audience of people aged between 15-30-year olds is the most appropriate for my final product as this is around the age that people are beginning to look for jobs and/or planning on becoming a freelancer to gain experience before going into other full-time jobs. Furthermore, this age group is also the start of independence, which means that they may be creating plans such as birthday parties or weddings – which are two things that I offer to photograph and film for my clients on my ‘about’ page. My research into my target audience helped me to plan the content that I was going to show on my website, such as, making the website look professional and sleek, similarly with the footage and photography interesting to multiple audience. This is why I have added different types of photography, such as wildlife photography and portraits, these two genre’s will target different people making it easier to capture multiple people’s attention from only one page of photos. 

In my planning, I used a S.M.A.R.T Target grid to explain what I will be aiming to achieve in each lesson leading up to the deadline. Although this is an effective way of keeping on track of my tasks as I can clearly write what I’m trying to achieve and write whether I have achieved the task, I didn’t use it as much as I was expecting to. In more detail, I feel that my first production schedule helped more than writing the tasks in greater detail. Over the course of this project I feel that I stayed majorly on task and completed aspects of this project in good time and to a decent standard. For this reason, I am happy with my final product and glad that it has turned out better than I originally thought it would. In my planning page, I have also added the flow of my entire website. Most of which has changed now that I have created it. I have removed an element from my plan, such as my tutorials page – which is in relation to an earlier point I made about my website not being a place for learning but a place for finding out about me – I removed the tutorials page because I didn’t want to teach my audience outright, if they wanted to learn something or know information then they can directly contact me. As well as this, I moved some elements around, on my home page I moved the image of my desk to the bottom of the page because in my opinion, it wasn’t very important information for the audience to see (unless, of course, the audience are interested in set ups). I replaced the image of my desk with a short video, also known as a showreel. I did this because a moving image on the home screen is more likely to entertain my audience, especially on first glance as it looks more professional. To create my website, I had to learn a few skills that I did not have at the start of the project. For example, I had to learn how to use Wix for the first time, I have learnt this skills to the point that I understand how to complete change a template to look like a unique one, add my own assets, create a logo using the Wix logo maker, and add apps that are accessible for my audience to use on the site or on their phones. As an extra part of this project, I decided to make a simple, but to-the-point print advert. This advert was posted on my Facebook page that promotes my website, where the people that have liked the page can see it. After I posted the print advert, someone messaged me saying that my website “looks good” and that the pictures that I have put on there “look good too”. Overall, I believe that my planning was successful and helped me create and promote my website to my intended target audience. 

Now that I have finished all of my production, I can see that I have gained a lot of experience in website making as well as in setting up freelance websites. I have also gained knowledge in how showreels are created and what makes them effective. For future reference, I will plan my showreel as though it was a actual piece that is companied with a storyboard. I want to do this as when it came to editing, I was stuck with a lot of footage to edit together and find what I want to add into the showreel before hand as I was left with a lot of work to do on it and not a lot of time.

To begin with, the idea of keeping an ongoing diary was helpful, it allowed me to make short paragraphs that where more like notes to keep track of the aspects that I have changed and things that I want to add. However, towards the end of the project, my diary was less and less used and I no longer felt that I needed to keep track of it – much like the S.M.A.R.T Targets that I made. Overall, I feel that these two facts show that I do not need a diary to keep track of what I’m doing because eventually, I do not use it. 

To conclude, my website turned out to be exactly what I had said that I was going to create and for that, I am happy that I managed to reach that goal. Throughout this project, I have used previous targets on my older projects such as exploring a variety of different ways to gather primary research. I feel that I have accomplished this because I used my primary research of Wix and Squarespace to make a website, I made a questionnaire on SurveyMonkey which I have never done before and I also used my knowledge from my year 10 and 11 GCSE's to apply Blumler & Katz' to my final product. In the future, I will take more time to create a schedule, film footage earlier in the project and do plenty of research into a wider range of topics that relate to the project brief.