SITE: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE AND SOFTWARE LIMITATIONS

When starting to design the site, I wrote down every page I wanted to include. The site was then called Fiona Motion’s Drag Commotion (something that was shortened in building the architecture, as I wanted clear, short labels). I am pleased to say that I have accomplished most of these initial ideas. Some, however, understandably given the nature of the site, fell by the wayside. Initially, I wanted to include a section on the history of the Dublin Drag Scene and another section to accompany this, an archive. The idea would be that throughout the media section of the site, there would be an opportunity for its users to submit video, audio or images to Commotion’s archive. As much as I liked this idea, it ultimately felt like a completely different site and was excised. Another page that was excised was Press. I built all of the other pages and left Press until last but given the promotional nature of the whole site (For example, the performer's biographies which were built both to inform and promote, whilst also still being quirky, appealing and fun), it seemed redundant and was excised.

Here is a picture of my wire frame design:
 

Here is a picture of my card sort:
 

Throughout implementation, I began to realise the limitations of Webnode. I thought it particularly important to have Social Media Links in the header next to the search bar, however I found no way to implement this. As such, I decided to make them a feature of certain pages (notably, the cast pages) and I felt that this usage broke up and enlivened the text that they surrounded.

Such functionality limitations become more problematic. One of my main issues with Webnode was that I couldn’t implement my design the way I wished. Here are two sketches of the homepage:


I wanted to have multiple sections on the front page, hoping to replicate the design ratios I read about in the module (something I was striving for in the second sketch above), however using this template, which was the only one fit for purpose, the boxes that were used to build the website were always the complete width of the webpage. There was no way to amend this. I found this very disappointing – I investigated other website building websites and found that Wix could do this and was much more malleable (they also had, as standard, a social media bar).

I also found it frustrating that Webnode enforced a sort of separateness between text and code; a good example of this would be the audio page – I would’ve liked the text to be in the same box as the Spotify playlists but when using the embed code feature, that was all I could do in that section. This separateness became a huge problem when it came to building the Video page. Initially, I had envisioned a page of embedded YouTube videos with text describing them interspersed, which was not possible, however, ultimately I decided not to embed any videos as I did not want to be seen to “use” other people content – all images throughout the site are accredited and the Spotify playlist was easily created but I did not want to “appropriate” someone else’s videos and pretend it was Commotion’s work, or create and upload content to YouTube to use for the site. Like most external links throughout the website, I made up "dummy links", ie. a YouTube link that when hovered over looks like it will direct you to a video but there is nothing there once clicked. There are, of course, some real external links, and they have been carefully selected. 

Finally, I had intended to use machine-readable headings throughout the website but when I tried to change the heading to a h1 tag for example, it would change all of the text on the page to a heading. There was no way around this. I tried to change just one section and it would change all of the text; I tried to edit the HTML and put the heading tags around just the text I wanted to use as a header but it would not take. As such, I have used caps and the bold tag throughout, whilst being aware that the bold tag is not machine-readable.

Some positive aspects of Webnode were; the fact that when building the site and linking to other pages on the site, the site uses preview links, but when everything is published it automatically updates those links for you, something I thought I would have to do manually; whilst not the most stylish blog, I was grateful that there was an inbuilt blog available to use on the site; and finally, that the template I was using automatically included a search function in the header.