creating a website

Creating a website

As part of my professional practice I am creating my own website in time for me finishing my degree. From a personal opinion, I see having a website as a very important aspect of being a professional in todays industry. Social media and the internet are more popular than ever and advancements in technology and these areas only keep on growing. When looking to create a webiste to initialy get me started as a new professional in the industry I am looking for somewhere I can create a simple and affordable webpage. 

One aspect of having a website I had thought of prior to now making my own website is a domain name. Last year I bought 2 domain names in preparation for creating my own website. I bought domain names of 'ellecain' with both '.co.uk' and '.com'. Although I didn't really feel ready to have my own website up and running this time last year I wanted to make sure I bought my domain names to prevent them being taken by anyone else before making my site. 

As I am currently a student and just need something fairly basic for a website I have come to the conclusion that using a provider where I build my website on and pay so much a month or a year to that provider is the most affordable and sensible idea to go with. 

I don't know any web designers at this point in my career nor do I have the money to pay any kind of web designer to design a sight for me so using a template on a website is what I have done. When looking for websites to use to create my own website I have looked at several ones which I found simply through using a search engine. I chose to give two websites a go when creating my own website. Those two websites were 'Moonfruit' and 'WIX'. I went with these two sites as not only were they some of the top and most used results on google but I was also recommended them by people I know who have already used them, for uses other than just photography sites. 

Moon fruit

Moon fruit was a site recommended to me by someone I know who has an online sports shop. They said this was the format they first used before getting to the stage of being able to afford and use their own web designer. Here is a very simply layout I chose. The webiste provides many different layouts for the many different needs someone may have from a website. This layout was recommended to be used for a photography website. As the print screen below shows, the layout looks very clean and simple, and the editing looks fairly simple to use. When using the editing software however, I wasn't finding any great ease in using it to create my own site. Because I am not skilled in creating a website, or ever even created my own or any webiste before, I found I need something which is straight forward and easy to use. With wanting this website to be created just as a starting ground and something which can be completed before I leave University in a number of months, I also need to use a site which I can be confident I will be able to get my website made and up and running in this limited amount of time. Due to the difficulty I had in using this site I went on to try other websites which prefer a similar service. 

WIX

the next website I used was WIX. This website had been suggested to me by my peers, and I was told you could actually create a website on here and have it up and running for no cost, if you would be willing to have the 'wix' logos posted on your website as advertisement. The advertisements do however come up rather big and weren't something I would be prepared to have on my website. You are still able to create your website then once finished choose a payment option of either a monthly payment for your website or a yearly fee. 

Just like moon fruit, I was able to choose a layout I liked then edit it myself. I chose a theme that was again designed for a photography website. As shown above gives an idea of what the layout looked like. I chose to delete the background image and rather than replacing it with my own image, I kept it plain white as I have previously discussed, I liked the professional wesbites I looked at which were plain white as I felt they looked more professional and clean, and created no distractions from the images.

Rather than creating several pages for the many photography projects I have done, I chose to just create a select few and use only my best work / images. A website after all is to showcase my best work and portray myself and my work in a really positive light. 

The projects I chose to use were the documentary project os sedgefield ball game, in 2014 and 2016 and Durham Miners gala 2015.

I chose this layout where you scroll through the images from left to right, as I felt it was a clear and easy way for viewers of my website to see my images. 

I chose to go for a simple and standard font on every page, the font I used was Times New Roman. I feel this font looks professional and can be easy read. I wanted to use a font and colour scheme on my website that I can then go on to carry on using when making my own buissness cards or anything else I may use to promote myself.