Digital Platforms: Final Report

A1715890

Concept and Overview:

The overall concept of my website, Style Stop ADL, is to highlight the fashion in Adelaide. The typical posts you will see on the website will be recommendation of clothing stores, upcoming fashion events, outfits ideas, designers and all things to do with regards to fashion in Adelaide, South Australia. The audience that is intended for my website are those who obviously love fashion, I have refined my audience slightly by only focusing on fashion in Adelaide but it also could be useful for people visiting interstate or internationally who want to know what Adelaide has to offer with regards to fashion. Being that it is a fashion website, the majority of the audience will be females, ranging from young teen to an older age demographic seeing fashion has no age limit. There are thousands upon thousands different fashion websites/blogs to this date which has made it quite hard to set mine apart from the rest. The reason I have solely chosen to just focus on fashion in Adelaide is because from personal experience I have found a lack of content for where I live.

Visual Communication and Design:

I have chosen to have a very minimalist design, keeping in a mostly black and white theme with fine fonts to let the content be the main focus. My main form of medium on my website is photography, I have used a combination of my own photos and sourced other material from such sites as Instagram and Tumblr to give my audience a range of different styles of images to perceive. I made sure to give adequate credit to the photographer who took the images that I used on my website. In the majority of my post on StyleStopADL I have chosen to display quite large photos in a flowing direction, I have done this because I feel it gives an Instagram ‘feel’ to the site which more people are comfortable with and it won’t be too much for the viewer’s eyes to take in all at once.

Both photos featured to the right and left are screenshots of StyleStopADL, showcasing the way I display my photos in a ‘flowing direction’.

Throughout my website, I used simple fonts because simplicity and neutrality allows the text to be the main focus, the Swiss school of Design typifies that “Cleanliness is next to godliness” which is their approach to this theory (Saltz).

I created headings to be used in the menu bar, the text and the underline design creates parallel lines, I did this because parallelism helps bring clarity, efficiency, forcefulness, rhythm and balance and it connects visual elements (Tufte).

User Interface Design:

I have chosen to keep my website very minimalist with a black and white theme.By keeping in this theme throughout the whole website, it allows the content to be the main focus, I have done this because our peripheral vision is not very good and our eyes cannot focus on things around the edges as why I kept the background white so it does not distract the viewer away from the content (Johnson). I placed the menu bar at the top of the site because everyone will be familiar with it and also incorporated the proximity principle which is that relative distance between objects in a display affects perception of whether and how objects are organized into subgroups (Johnson). I placed the categories in order to which I thought the audience would be most interested in, and made sure that the categories weren’t too close to one another because if controls are spaced poorly people will have trouble perceiving them (Johnson).

From the wireframe, you can see that my design has been simple from day one. I wanted the structure of my website to be easy to use so that any age demographic would be able to understand the concept of the website.

In my blog posts, I kept the writing to a minimum and only included the most important information. I did this because I thought that the readers would be more inclined to keep looking through my website if it didn’t feel like they were reading a whole article rather than just a few images and a sentence of information.

Screenshot above is to display writing style on my website.

User Experience Design across Digital Platforms:

To broaden my websites audience viewership, I have extended my website into two different digital media platforms which are Instagram and twitter. I felt that both these platforms both give very different ways to connect with the audience. The most popular photo capturing and sharing application is Instagram, since its launch in October 2010, it has attracted more than 150 million active users and allows you to keep a constant flow of content which keeps your audience active with the website (). For example, I did a ‘Countdown to Groovin’ the Moo’ because the fashion aspect is such a strong part of the event and I gained over 20 followers just by posting constituently over 5 days. I used my Instagram to either post images to let my audience know that there was a new post on the website or photos that related or went with the theme of Style Stop ADL.

In the photo on the left is of a screenshot of one of my Instagram stories, this feature allows my audience to always be in contact and the photo on the right a post I uploaded to inform my audience that there was a new post.

The screenshot on the left is of story on my Instagram. I use this feature to let my audience know that there is a new post on my website.

The screenshot on the right is a post on Instagram, again to inform my audience about new content.

I also use twitter because it is a great platform to talk to my audience one on one. I also connect my Instagram with my twitter so when I post via Instagram it will be tweeted out, this allows all platforms to connect seamlessly. To create symmetry throughout website and social media’s, I made all of the usernames the same so there was no confusion what the sites name was and then it would be easily accessible for the audience to find our site on other digital platforms. To combat any other confusion, I kept my logo as the display photo on each platform just to reassure the audience.

The screenshots above and on the right and left are of my Instagram and twitter. Keeping in the same theme allows the audience know it is the same site.

The photo to the right is of drawings of brainstorming ideas for StyleStopADL logo.

Audience Metrics:

Out of my website, Instagram and Twitter, my audience is by far more engaged through my Instagram than any other platform. Instagram now has over 700 million users which explains why the was such a significant rise in the followers on that platform compared to the other (Marwick). Personally, I mostly use Instagram the most so this could factor into it because I post more content on the platform which intend more people will see it and follow me.

From my WordPress stats, I found that the most viewed time on my site was around 1pm and on Mondays. From these insights, it is a good indicator that I should post early in the morning on Mondays or late Sunday so that my audience will see the new content quicker.

At the moment, the majority of my audience is from Australia which easy to know what time is best to post as I am in the same time-zone but as my audience grows and more people from international countries view my site it will become trickier.

Future Directions and Development:

My vision for this website is to grow my audience and as fashion is ever changing so will my website. I think in a lot of cases people who start websites/blogs tend to broaden their audiences by joining YouTube which would give the Style Stop ADL a different element and depth to it. It would be a seamless transition into videography/ YouTube, as there are so many opportunities to make interesting fashion content with in Adelaide. It would also give a face/ voice from all the content they have read to the audience. Also, it would be very beneficial to make a Facebook page as it is one of the most used social media’s, Facebook’s users have increased from 12 million to 150 million in 2008 and then grown to almost a billion by the middle of 2012; Among 50% of all American use Facebook and 78% of them are teenager which are a high rate of my audience. (Marwick)In terms of how many times I will update the site is hard to say, I will be able to post lots of fashion outfit posts and store recommendations but seeing Adelaide is quite small it will be hard to post lots about fashion events and designers.

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References:

Saltz, I. (2009), Typography Essentials, edited by Ina Saltz, Rockport Publishers. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/adelaide/detail.action?docID=3399785.

Tufte, E. (2012). Visual Explanations. 1st ed. Cheshire (Conn.): Graphics Press.

Johnson, J. (2010). Designing with the mind in mind. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Marwick, A. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press.

Hu, Y., Manikonda, L. and Kambhampati, S., (2014, June). What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types. In ICWSM.

My Followers

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