a) purpose
For photography students to share ideas, and work in a safe, secure environment. They can follow their favourite photographers. Write blogs and use this as work experience on their CVs. They can find people to work with to practice their skills and to learn from.
b) content
There will be a navigation bar at the top of the page. Popular photographers will be featured on the home page, encouraging people to like and follow them. Users will have a profile page with a showcase of 25 photos, and all of their work, including recent blog posts. There will be an explore page where users can search for photographers or content. Adverts will be displayed among search results and featured photographers. The adverts will be non-obtrusive.
c) target user/membership
Target users are photography students aged between 16 and 25. They will be interested in the world around them, and in doing photography later in life. There will be a paid option which removes adverts and offers users advanced statistics about their blog and profile as well as a portfolio website. Members will pay £5 per month to get these features.
d) production plan / timescales
f) possible revenue streams (how it might make money)
The website will feature non-obtrusive advertising throughout which will bring in the majority of revenue for the company. There will be a paid membership option which will also bring in revenue for the company.
6 Months after the initial launch of the website we hope to have 5000 people signed up. Approximately 5% of these will pay to be members. 250 Members * £5 per month = £1250 per month. This is already a profit of £990.01 per month. Adverts running on the site will give us a revenue of approximately £100 per month depending on website traffic. Overall profit will be £1090.01 per month.
g) budget
All the design work has been done for free, by me. The website will then need to be coded into a working example. Presuming one web-developer will work on this website for 30 hours per week for 1 week to create the website and get it to a state to be published if he works for £25 per hour this initial process will cost £750.
The website will then have an additional cost per month for server hire, website domain name, professional email, and website maintenance provided by our full-stack web-developer. Server and Email and Domain package will cost £9.99 per month. Our developer will need to work on the website for 10 hours each month to implement security fixes and updates, this will cost £250. Therefore, the website will cost £259.99 per month to maintain.
h) consider legal/ethical issues
Photography is often used to express the human body as an art-form which leads to nude photography, as this website is for students, potentially underage, no photography of this kind will be allowed on the site. Users under 13 will require their parents’ permission to sign up to the site, but there will be no age limit to join.
i) Privacy/security measures
The website will use HTTPS to encrypt the connection between the server and the user’s computer. The database containing members passwords will use 256-bit encryption. The website will use a CDN to serve images, making the website load faster. There will be a custom right click plugin installed on the website to prevent people from saving users images. Only low-resolution images will be shown on Google, preventing people from stealing our members’ images. Copyright logos will also be shown on the images.
j) site map
k) Detailed information as to why that target audience will find it useful and easy to navigate around the website.
The target audience will find this website useful as it will help them develop their photographic skills. Only the most important pages have links at the top of the page, whilst the more in-depth terms and conditions pages are at the bottom of the page out of the way in order to showcase users’ photos at the top of the page.
The homepage has many links to sign up to the website, encouraging users to do just that so that they can see all the features. Text hierarchy draws users to read the catch phrase, then to join the website. If people continue scrolling down they see high standard images from users on the site, giving them an example of what the site is used for. The footer contains links to more in-depth pages containing information for the press, about the company, copyright information, jobs, etc. These page links are in a list with a header summarizing what the links below are about. This helps users to navigate to the page that they want and find out the correct information.
A user’s page is very simple, with the nav bar at the top of the page, allowing users to search the site, upload photos, and navigate through the site. There is a cover image chosen by the photographer which will be their best photo, then there is their logo which is a circle, situated in the centre of the page. There is a brief biography below the user’s name, with links to different sections within their account. Images are presented clearly, cleanly and take up most of the page, as this is what the website is for, and this is what the target audience will want to see. The same footer is used for ease of use so that the website has a coherent corresponding design.
The website is very simple to use and features a design that does not change on different pages, this makes it easy to use for the target audience as they want to get information as quickly as possible so don’t want to click through lots of different web pages in order to look at a feed of photos. Photos are very large on the website as this is a photography website which means it will attract the target audience and they will be able to see examples of work that they could do or photographers they could work with.