Brits Next Top Model

Today I found out that in the new series of Britain's Next Top Model one of the contestants if a young girl from Farnham. I thought this would be great for the site as it relates to Farnham and shows what is happening here.
So in todays lesson I wrote up a quick story for the site.

Going Live

In todays lesson we planned on going live. We wanted to go live today as we had enough content to initially fill the site, and this would give us a few weeks until our deadline. This meant that over the next few weeks we could keep uploading new content, making our website fresh.

Yet with had problems with Dreamweaver, with our homepage when we created in on dreamweaver everything looked fine. Yet when we viewed the site through the internet the boxes were not lined up correctly, making the site look wonky and one sided. It was near the end of the day, and some people in the group were getting stressed out so we made a group decision to all come in tomorrow and again try to work on the site with fresh heads.

7/4/09 Lesson

In todays lesson I researched news stories for the UCA section of the site. As well as doing a feature on the student union for this section, I will feature some short news stories about the uni. I used my time in the lesson to contact several different students some information and quotes for my news pieces.

These news pieces will work well with the site, they will be suitable for students in the area but it will also be interesting for people who are interested in coming to the university and for local residents. As this will give them an opportunity to see what is happening at there local uni.

'Top Gear' Style Race

Today we filmed our ‘top gear’ style race. This was for one of our features for the site. The idea behind it is too start at a set location and then race back in a car, on a train and on a bus; to determine which is the best way too travel.

We decided to video these and this will mean we can have the videos on the site along side the written feature.

Me and Lauren drove, Adam and Sophie got the train and Liz and a friend got the bus. We all started at Guildford train station and raced back too Farnham train station.

The equipment we used to film was really easy to use. We then took the footage back to uni, and edited it.

This was loads of fun to film, and will give our website a lot more interactivity. We decided to edit the videos into each separate journey, rather one long film. This will give our website viewers a chance to pick and choose the videos they want to watch.

We now have to upload the videos onto the site.

Hunting Ghosts

Farnham is known to be haunted so for my feature, I went out and hunted ghosts.

This involved me going to Waverley Abbey, Farnham’s Parish Church and Farnham Castle.

I decided to do this as a feature as it is an interesting subject. When you Google haunted places in Farnham you are met with loads of sites which claim what has been seen. But as an unbeliever in ghosts I wanted to do a different take on a Farnham ghost hunt. This will also attract more people to our site.

You can read how my hunt went on the site.

Website Design

When discussing the design of the website we decided to use the Dreamweaver programme. We decided to use this as our whole group has used it before and familiar with it. This will mean everyone can put with the design work.

We also decided to use Fast Hosts as our domain.

Content Ideas

Our unit requires us to work a lot with our content. We have to work with live content, add original stories and re-purposed and syndicated from elsewhere. The group used this lesson to work out the content we wanted on our site. Obviously all our content must be surrounding Farnham!

Some of the content we wish to put on the site.

Shop info. This would include info on the shops in town for young people, the products they sell and if student discounts our offered.

Events. This would be any information of events that may be of interest to young people.

Tour of Farnham. We hope to create a virtual tour of Farnham. Showing young people the places they can visit.

Uni. We also decided a section on the uni was appropriate, as so many young people in the area are students at the uni.

The Maltings. This would show information on events being help at The Maltings.

“The Race”. We plan to do a feature on a travel/top gear style race. This will also be filmed for the website.

General. We also decided the website definitely needed a general information page, including contact us etc.