I’ve decided to be a bit adventurous in terms of creating my own showreel website and want to craft it from scratch using Dreamweaver. I really want my website to be a reflection of me and I’m really interested in design at the moment and therefore want to have a really well designed page that doesn’t just look like everyone else’s. Whilst looking for people to interview for my personal networking report I took in what their website looked like and decided that in terms of my own preference I really like simple websites that don’t have too much going on and are really accessible in terms of finding information. One of my favourites was Christopher Fulham’s who is an experimental new media artist his website is simple yet distinctive and showcases his work without really giving too much away. His site has images from his key works as a selected works option that you can flick through from the home page and then has specific pages that link to other info such as bio, etc. With our own websites they have to have a lot more info than Christopher’s, but what I don’t want to do is overload people with too much information. Therefore, in conjunction with my website I am going to set up a vimeo page with the full-length versions of all my video works. These will be housed separately with a link on the actual site. I got this idea from Closer Productions website when I was researching doco people for our seminar in which they have little icons in the top corner of their page for their twitter, facebook and vimeo accounts. I will do something similar on mine.
In terms of the design of my website I realised that I needed to figure out how to use Dreamweaver and have been going through quite a dense tutorial. This hasn’t been too difficult as I remember some html from previous studies and Dreamweaver is actually a lot easier. Going through the tutorial is really helpful as it tells you actually how to do things and because I’ve already had a little bit of experience I have been able learn it all quite quickly. I have gone through two sections with a sample website, which I should be able to build the majority of my website from and when I want to do the other details will move onto the next steps. The hardest thing with building a website is making sure the layout is right, adding content is quite easy it’s all about setting up those foundation blocks, such as spacing and how it is all going to look on your screen.
What I am going to do is to start drawing up a paper version of my website, either by hand or using photoshop. I really want to be able to visualise how I want it to look and I think it’s really important to have a really nicely designed website, considering we all are media practitioners.
Hannah's media/film/tv blog 