DA: prototyping

Kira and I have been working on our digital artefact from August to October and we are extremely happy with our progress so far. Moving away from the ideating phase of our project, we began to envision how we wanted to mould our website, La Vie Etc., through various prototyping methods. We were able to put thought to paper through paper prototyping, which we learnt how to do through readings such as this one. We roughly drew up logo designs that we thought matched the minimalistic aesthetic, as well as website layout ideas, such as the home page and article presentation. Translating these ideas on to a digital platform proved to have some setbacks. For example, it was hard to get the right shade of pink for the logo that we had in mind when using logo-creation websites, and so we opted for black instead, which we ended up liking better.

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More changes needed to be made when choosing the website creator; Wix was our primary choice as it was free and had lots of layout designs that we could choose from. However, it did end up being quite hard to learn the mechanics of, so we searched for other creators. Irritatingly, most of them required a monthly subscription or needed small purchases to be made in order to access certain layouts, which we were trying to avoid. We also considered WordPress as we have experience using it. In the end we decided to stick with Wix, and learnt how to use it by watched many tutorials, like this and this, as well as conducted some further research on Twitter to see if we could find any useful tips and tricks. Another setback that we had to consider was the fact that Wix’s layout options would mean that our original layout ideas would have to be adjusted as certain layouts meant there were certain restrictions to what we could do.

Setting up the website took a while as we had a certain aesthetic we were going for, and finding the right photos, both on our camera rolls and online, was difficult. Kira and I are both very visual people and if something was not looking right, or was not fitting in to what we envisioned, it needed to be fixed. Although it was frustrating at the time, I’m glad we took the time to adjust minor details as we are both happy with the way the website is functioning.

In terms of content, we began to write articles on topics we had decided would help achieve our goal of being a university-aged girl’s advice website, such as places to find cheap but well-made clothes. We also dabbled into other genres like entertainment, cooking, and even sustainability to get a feel of what we liked writing about, and what we thought our audience would like to see from us. We also called on our audience to see what they would like to read about. We did this by uploading suggestion boxes to our Instagram page, as it would be easier to keep all ideas in one place rather than having to receive DMs. Since the Beta video, we have promoted our first article on our Instagram, and will encourage more submissions via email as it can be anonymous, which will increase audience interaction.

More on our audience, we were initially just following local university students, but decided to branch out to a wider audience; we followed the followers of social media influencers, such as Bella Fiori, whom have similar personalities, content, and aesthetic to what we are going for. This allowed us to specifically target a certain kind of person in order to refine our audience.  

The feedback we have gotten so far has been very positive and encouraging, which is definitely motivating us to keep pushing out articles and continue to work on our website!

(Fourth of October 2019)