2. Intro
■ My website is a blog site / review page for gigs, musicals and other events that happen in
London.
■ My reason for deciding this style of website is because personally, I look for other people’s
opinions about shows before deciding whether I want to buy tickets, especially if they are more
expensive.
■ The purpose is to give honest reviews of the event including the venue, staff, artists / actors. I
will make it clear that the reviews are just my opinion so may be bias depending on previous
feelings towards a show / artist.
■ I wanted to include images and videos of the events as well as Spotify links, social media links
and maps. I also wanted to include a message feature in case readers had specific questions
that I didn’t cover in the blog post already. This would also mean readers could interact with
me directly which would allow them to trust me more as they’d know the reviews were
genuinely my opinion and not built off existing reviews.
■ With the content, I want to include the facts such as date, venue, who, what and why because
I think it’s important my audience get the facts and opinions so they can then make their own
decisions. My site is more of a guide than telling the audience where to go.
3. Challenges I faced
■ There were several challenges throughout the process of building my site, starting
with the fact I’d never used WordPress before, so it took a while to get used to
how it works.
■ With the interactions, it took some time before I finally understood how to use
plugins. Some plugins were more complicated than others and I couldn’t get them
to work for example having a pop up on one page only.
■ My next challenge was I didn’t know how much space each plugin was taking up so
after downloading 3 I was confused about why no more were working. I then found
out it is because I had no space and had to pay for the pro version. This limited the
number of plugins I was able to use which meant I couldn’t use the idea of
including a map of each venue.
4. What did I achieve
■ I managed to include a newsletter at the bottom of the site that means users can subscribe and be
notified when new content has been uploaded.
■ I included a gallery page with carousels for each event so users can scroll through images from the
shows. This is beneficial for users who prefer visuals over text or have difficulty reading large
chunks of text easily.
■ I used an instant chat plugin for users to communicate with me. As mentioned, its helpful if users
have more questions or any queries about the site.
■ Smaller interactions I included were social media links, deep links, Spotify embeds and a
comments section. The comments section is useful for me as it allows users to leave feedback
which means I can improve the site based on the criticism.
■ Even though it was a challenge, I did eventually include a map. For me this was the biggest
achievement as it came after hours of struggling with getting my site to load due to storage
problems.
6. What to
improve…
■ I found Wordpress difficult to use so I think if I’d
spent more time looking at tutorials then maybe I
could have used a nicer template. This website
was about showing I could use plugins and in total
I used 4 so I am proud of that. However, if I was
to do this again, I could now work on improving
aesthetics as I managed to get my head around
how plugins work. It’s an unfamiliar platform for
me so it did take a while for me to figure out how
each component was used.
■ I think my next step would be placement of
interactions and ensuring my interactions are
necessary. As this was to show I could include
interactions, I did use a lot of them within my
site. Therefore, I could work on using important,
essential interactions and not just as many as I
could. As mentioned, I used 4 plugins but next
time I could look at using plugins specific to my
audience needs and my product.
9. Conclusion:
■ To conclude, I found this module trickier
than I thought it would be. WordPress was
hard to learn but now I feel more
confident using it if I was asked to do it
again.
■ Having said that, I think my site does fit
the criteria as I included the required
number of interactions as well as using
plugins, deep links and various forms of
media. Whilst I would want to improve
the style of my site, I am proud of what I
have created and the fact I taught myself
how to use elements of WordPress.
■ I think my site is easy to navigate, easy to
understand and fulfills its purpose of a
blog site.
