Development of Website Design

All designs were made by me in Photoshop. For the most part I used a canvas size of 1024 x 768 pixels as according to the W3C website, this is the most commonly used screen resolution.

I began by creating a neutral colour scheme. I used light colours as I felt this would create an open and inviting feel to the site.



After receiving feedback from Mehreen I then decided to change the colours to reflect a most rustic homely, feel.



I then decided that maybe using an image as header would give it a bit more impact.



I then decided that the more options I could present to the group the better, so came up with another design. This one took rather longer than the others to produce.

Development of Logo

This week I have made progress on the logo for the website.

Last week I made some sketches, exploring multiple ideas. It looked something like this

At the beginning of this week, I took to photoshop and produced the following, at this point still not completely set on an idea.

A few days later, I looked at these ideas again and decided on one which I thought had the most potential and looked least amateurish. I felt that having books in the logo would be a good idea, and liked the idea of the three letters of the book shop name, S, T and B of Small Town Books, acting as perhaps bookends, with some books falling over, as the books on my bookshelf never stay upright. I produced further sketches of this idea in photoshop.



Then I used Adobe Illustrator to produce a more professional set of designs.

These upright oblong shapes are book spines, and will be rendered as such later. I found that it was easy in Illustrator to quickly produce many different configurations using the same elements. I will get feedback on which of these is most effective from my team next week.

I had a clear idea of what I wanted the font to look like. In the final design it will look like this. My preference is for the top design, however I am intending to get feedback from my team before going ahead. The colours are interchangeable.

This week I also started to think about what types/genres of book will be available in the online shop. I also started to collect information for cookery books, because I knew that this genre will definitely be included. I will finish off gathering book information next week.

I also thought about colour palettes for the website.



The group of colours on the left fit into the rustic, warm colour scheme that we mentioned in the bid. The other colours could be used depending on the actual images that will go on the site.

week 2 tasks done

http://www.martinfrancis.org/smalltownbooks/admin.html

database design What fields are required?
Create mysql database
create php form that updates database fields from the admin page,
Get some book data to go in fields
view database to check that form works and is adding data

Week 1 tasks

Colour scheme
Decide on navigation main headings and subheadings including genre
types for general area and cooking area
Images visuals, logo
Basic layout
Div structure, HTML and CSS
Twitter and blog (possible 2, general one and cooking one)

e commerce sites reviewed

http://econsultancy.com/blog/5160-best-of-2009-24-e-commerce-sites-reviewed

Would of been nice to know about the when we did the critique.

But worth spending a few minutes on now, to see a few good examples.