Final!

Check out my final website!

a) My target audience is people living in the Portland area who are in need of home improvements at affordable prices. My audience is not restricted my age, sex, or income because a family of five bringing in $100k/yr is going to have different needs than a bachelor(ette) bringing in that same income. I chose to go with black, white, charcoal, light grey, and orange as my accent. I wanted to keep things neutral to appeal to a wider demographic, and orange reminds me of construction so that is why I went with that for my pop of color.

b) This one was a lot easier than the midterm because I'd done much of the trouble-shooting already. My main concern that I had to fiddle with a bit was getting my tables to line up the way I wanted them to.

c) Without the images of Chris's work it would be hard for him to obtain business through his website. They add to his credibility. Giving the images borders/padding/etc fancied them up a bit, and I guess in that sense the CSS for my images added to the "siteness"....if I am understanding this part of the question correctly.

d) I used a light grey background color with dark text. The contract made it easy to read, but making it light grey instead of white took care of some of the white space and I believe it draws the eye to the table.

e) The media is okay. I would only have it on the site because of this assignments requirement. It is an interview from a morning show about the myths of home improvements. It does show in a power-point within the video (that fortunately is the main paused screen when you go to the page) that adding a deck to your home is one of the best ways to spend your money...however, they don't say it out loud in the interview, so that was a little disappointing. It is a YouTube video so the user would need a Flash plug-in.

f) Everything validated except for the video:)

g) SEO improved my site because I found some good keywords to use to get my site better noticed by search engines. I also added links to Lowes and Home Depot on my home page to increase my chances of being found. I used Link Popularity to check and see how well these sites would do, and I didn't find much. I did see that Martha Stewarts home page links to Lowes - but the other links listed weren't very familiar to me. However - I did not know what else to put on there that would be relevant.

h) I looked at a bunch of the browsers in the Adobe Browser Lab. Firefox 3.0 for Mac and Windows, the most recent versions of Chrome and Safari, and IE 7.0 as well as IE 8.0. The biggest differences were:
1: IE 7.0 eliminated this small strip of white space that shows up about my main header, for reasons I do not know.
and,
2: Firefox 3.0 for Windows showed everything a bit more defined than the other browsers. I preferred the look of this browser the most.
I did not make any changes to my based on my Browser Lab experience.


i) For the testing requirements I haven't already discussed - All of my links worked. Everything looked good for my load time except that I was cautioned my images took up too much space and should be shrunk down or changed from a JPG to a PNG. Also, I ran accessibility testing through www.cynthiasays.com and everything passed - except for that darn YouTube video. I believe my site is very user friendly. I placed images on the main page the links directly to the main galleries. Navigation is consistent, as well as colors and text. I even put in breadcrumbs to give the user an added way to get back to the main gallery page while on a sub-gallery page.

j) Here's one more chance to check out my final!