The final step: making. Although we had already made our website, La Vie Etc., via website builder Wix, the creating has not stopped. The website creation, even with the tedious process of figuring out the mechanics of Wix, seemed to be the easiest part. Again, as Kira and I are very visual people, we focused a lot on our aesthetic, as we wanted to maintain a modern and simplistic look across the whole project. This meant we needed to pay close attention to details, which took a lot of time, but our efforts paid off as we are very happy with our project’s look. With that being said, we are constantly making iterations, such as adjusting article thumbnails to match each other and also maintain the minimalistic design.
We have continued to work on articles for our advice website, and based on user feedback, such articles have been helpful for our target audience. For example, we uploaded an article about staying organised at university around the end of October, as exams are nearing, and received lots of positive feedback from users. By doing this, we have learnt that context is important when posting articles as it increases relevancy, and therefore engagement. We will be keeping this in mind for the future, and plan on posting an article suggesting horror movies to watch around Halloween time.
More on audience interaction and engagement, we have put a lot of time into our Instagram (@toalexandkira) where we promote our articles, and ask our followers whether it was helpful, or what we should write about next. Initially, we wanted our audience to interact with us via email as it felt like we were writing letters to each other, but Instagram seemed to work better as people use it more regularly. Instagram is also more casual, which fits into our DA as we wanted a more relaxed space where people felt comfortable when messaging us. Further, similar to what we did on the website itself, we ensured our Instagram feed looked cohesive and minimal to match our website. We learnt how to do this by watching YouTube videos, such as this one, and reading articles on how to create an Instagram feed that flows. We pre-planned the feed using apps like UNUM and edited using VSCO.
Our biggest hiccup at the moment would be the fact that our website does not work on our university’s Wi-Fi, which is out of our hands to fix. We have done our best to inform people of this on our respective Twitter accounts and DA Instagram, but we still get messages / comments informing us of this problem.
Overall, we are incredibly happy with our progress so far, and it has been enjoyable to see our project change from an idea on paper, to something that is tangible and helpful to others. We will continue to write and post articles over the coming weeks and encourage more feedback from users.
You can check out our website: La Vie Etc.
(Twenty-Third of October 2019)
in omnia paratus 