Kira and I knew that we wanted to get started on planning and editing our project early, and we are extremely happy with our progress so far. As we mention in the video, we began with paper prototyping to get any ideas we had in our heads on paper, which we learnt how to do using this video. We drew up general layout ideas, logos, and the way we wanted our articles to be presented when the respective menu category is clicked on. We had to make some changes when applying these ideas to the website creator, as certain layouts meant there were certain restrictions. We also attempted to use different websites to Wix or WordPress but a lot of them required monthly payments.
In terms of the content of our project, we began writing articles that we had already decided on, such as clothing stores that were affordable, and also experimented with other genres such as entertainment and cooking to get a feel of what we liked to write, and what we thought the audience would like to read. To get a more specific understanding of what our readers would like to see from us, we put up suggestion boxes on Instagram and got many helpful replies, which we will be considering when writing articles in the future. So far, we have been interacting with the audience the most on Instagram, but once the website is officially available to the public, we will encourage more submissions via email as Instagram DMs aren’t as anonymous as emails can be.
Another iteration in terms of social media, we were initially going to just follow local university students, but after a discussion with our tutor, we decided to follow those that were following social media stars such as Bella Fiori and others that have similar content and aesthetics, which has helped us grow our audience significantly.
September 2019
in omnia paratus 