Week 23 Making
Saturday 25th February 07
The layout of the website is finished now, every thing is in flash,. My initial plan was to make all using css and html or xhtml, but as my target audience are young children and most of the appealing young children’s sites are in flash, I came to the decision of making the site in flash.
I concentrated on the use of bright colours according to this article under the heading “Appeal To Kids And Teens” from
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol5/design_no11.htm
The article gives practical advice in how to make a website appealing to young children, following are the things that I should pay more attention to:
- Give the children direction on how to use the site
- Avoid scrolling make all the important site content appear on the screen without scrolling.
- They like cartoon look characters, bright colours, colouring page and games.
- They like watching animation than reading
As a result I decided to make most of the component of my site animated, or video and use less of a text. Also to have interactive stuff to make kids come and again.
For the last two weeks I was doing the design of the interactive part it is almost finished although I wanted to change some stuff which I was not 100% happy about it, such as the moving sky. I wanted to animate some Arabic letters, shapes or anything that gives the theme of being Islamic Arabic. I will see how it goes.
Screen shot of the site intro
Week 21, Making
Friday 9th February 07
This morning I went to Amar to discuss with him my progress and sign my monthly progress report. He was very happy with my progress which increased my enthusiasm to work much harder to get the project hopefully done on time.
Yesterday, i bought another hosting space with a domain name under my name “umalkheir com” to put my final year project documentation.
“Minisilam” was the first name that I thought of when thinking of what to call the site, and as a result bigRedFeet sponsored the site and the price of the winner prizes. However, during the making stages, I just had and idea of calling the site “islamoArt”.
I asked friends opinion, what do they think of those two names
(MiniIslam) and (islamoArt)?
Most agreed on islamoArt, their opinion was that Islamoart is more artistic, elegant name. In my opinion miniislam, gave me the impression that I’m belittling Islam by saying mini, or if though saying that there is an Islam for young kids and another for older ones. Also the domain name was not written the way it was said “mini islam” as it was already taken by others, all these reasons made me changes the name of the site to “islamo art” and the domain name with .com was available.
Straight away I put some of the layout files to see how it will look and there is the site.
Screen shot of the testing site
islamoart.com
Week 20 Making
Friday 2 February 07
I’m still in the making part of the project and planning to finish by beginning of March so I can only concentrate on the dissertation and final touches.
Designing of the information part of the site is on progress, I’m planning for the time being to have only four links;
One for the video, another for the 3D interactive informative section, a third one for the Islamic world, a forth link for gallery viewing (where children work will be displayed) and a last one for contributors who want to be part of the project.
I designed the whole thing in a library theme, information can be found.
Screen shot of the informative part:
