Developing the site
Overall project
I found the overall project from designing the site to building it very interesting and a great learning curve, I have studied web development from a Computer Science point of view however studying web publishing and how content should be published to the web has been an interesting and very useful experience. The initial report and development of the site has pushed me to study more web principles and design concepts.
I am happy that my design and navigation structure are well done however I feel that my content writing could have been improved in adding more relevant content onto the home and about us pages.
The look and feel of the site maintains a modern light appearance whilst supplying the customer with any information they actually need. Finding images which were suitable for the site and also had the correct licence to allow me to use them on the site was difficult (without paying), https://morguefile.com/ however did hold some relevant images with a free licence which I could use freely.
Advantages and limitations of the software for achieving your web publishing goals
Webnode, as a quick and easy website creator, is very good. It is very easy to choose a template, upload a little bit of content and get your site live. I did find however that creating and aesthetic appearance of the site is very time consuming, as rearranging items, boards and colours is a lengthy process. The way the webnode lays out the navigation structure is very nice a easy to follow with it showing a hierarchy of the pages in one window. I felt that the website I have created takes onboard many of the design and usability concepts which have been given to me throughout the learning material of this course.
There were a few limitations of the software which left some tasks taking slightly longer than others. In addition there are also some features which are not quite as I would have liked them, this was mainly due to the limitations of customizing items easily. Items like the side search bar are quite hard to customise the colour, this would have been very easily done if a little more access to the CSS file was available. However this was a large job to download, edit then upload the CSS file just for a small change.
One nice feature is webnode helpfully providing you with a template to start working with, this allowed me to have a solid platform to start moving items around and adding items to the page. I feel I have added enough change to the page to give it a sense of identity for the plumbers net.
Overall Webnode is very good at allowing people who may not have been able to create a website from scratch or someone who is looking for a quick website to create that website and I have enjoyed working with the software. However people with a large knowledge of web design and development from scratch may find the software a bit too restrictive for themselves.
The ease on integrating social media into the site has been a great benefit, integration of a twitter social feed would be a benefit to companies as many companies are looking to twitter for a quick way of getting news out to customers. Now not only will they be approaching all followers on twitter but also all visitors to the website, I decided to keep this widget on every page throughout the website to both assist with a uniform layout and also to keep the customer informed on latest news wherever they are on the site.
One design feature of Webnode which could be improved is the use of alt tags with images, when using images in list items the image is given an alt tag of the list items title. There is however no option to change or expand on this.
All product images used : https://morguefile.com/ (Free License)