Concept and Overview
Beauty Island is the website where I want to share the Beauty tips, Skincare tips, life blog and recommend the products I like. This site features easy-access links to all social media platforms. The concept of this site is to share things about makeup and skincare, this site is aim to communicate with beauty fans and share ideas and comments with them. The blogs and articles are focused on my personal opinions of what products and tips I have enjoyed or found helpful. My intended audiences are the people who are interested in doing makeup and skincare, and want to know the tips of makeup and skincare. Overall, there are two target groups in makeup market, one is young cosmetic consumer group, include young people age of 15-35; another one is middle-aged cosmetics consumer groups, include people age of 35-55. The site does not limit the specific scope of visitors.
What is unique about my site is it is created for other beauty fans like me. It’s purely for sharing my personal experience and opinions, and it’s not for profit, whereas similar beauty sites mostly for commercial purpose. Further demonstrates innovation through the use of original photography, although not all, but some original photography are used in the blogs. This is a concept often overlooked by similar blogs.
Extension of Research and Learning
Publishing information on the Internet is mainly achieved through the website. If people want to obtain information on the Internet, they need to use a certain retrieval method to download the required information from the websites. Therefore, website construction is very important in the application of the Internet, and it has become an important part of information construction. Through the process of making a website this time, I have a better understanding of the basic knowledge, process and some techniques of website production, and I also know the importance of making a website plan. A good plan can make the planning of the relevant content of the website more detailed and clear, and save a lot of time for the follow-up work, so I am fully prepared when making the plan. Compared with other courses I have studied, this web design course pays more attention to personal creativity and the ability to use WordPress. My learning and research goals are: according to the requirements of the project, combined the web design theory knowledge learned in this course with the use of Photoshop and Adobe illustrator, to complete the design and production of a multimedia website with self-chosen topic. Through the determination of the theme, the design of the web page, the integration of the information, and other production processes, I have understood the theories and skills more deeply.
Visual Communication and Design
The visual impact of pictures is much stronger than texts. Images have two main functions in visual communication: first, images can be combined with text to better lay out web pages. Second, the designer’s design concepts and ideas can be better presented through images, thereby enhancing the artistic appeal of the web page (Coleman, 2007). The images can make the visual communication design have a unique style and attract the attention of more audiences. Visual communication is an essential factor to the running and success of the site. As The Beauty Island is predominantly beauty and skincare tips and product remmendation. The homepage suggests the identity of the website and can give an immediate impression for the rest of the content (Lawrence & Tavakol, 2007). The banner image displayed on the homepage was used to visually communicate the overall theme of the website at first glance, and the text before the banner image briefly introduces the theme of the website, which can better attract the attention of people who interested in.
As a typesetting choice, the two pictures at the bottom of the homepage of the website indicate two different parts of the website. There are two widgets at the bottom of the homepage, which point to different areas of the website, and come with images that help identify each part. These two pictures correspond to the articles in the “Life” section and the “Beauty Tips” section. If the viewer wants to read more, click the button next to the picture and the related article or post will be displayed.
Through photography, further visual communication is integrated into the Beauty Island. Photographic works can be used to serve as visual aids to convey content together with written texts, which can achieve better results (Coleman, 2007). For example, along with daily skin care articles are images of these products, in order to visually show the appearance of the product, and the text below the picture introduces the effect and price to the reader.
User Interface Design
During the page design stage of the Beauty Island, many popular skin care and beauty websites have been researched to find out which layout design is most practical. The research found that almost all of these websites use a simple website layout. The wireframe of the site was designed with an attempt for maximum attention in mind, whilst not making the home page too clustered (Lawrence and Tavakol, 2007). For this reason, my website uses a simplified layout and uses the WordPress theme “Exford”, which contains “featured banner images and simple color palettes”. and can be well responded on mobile devices. The huge banner image can make the homepage have a certain visual advantage. The less dense the homepage layout of the website, the more likely the user will continue to browse the website, rather than being overwhelmed and confused by the content and losing interest in the website (Vegh, 2011).
The website logo is at the top of the webpage, the title is designed in large font below the logo, and then a short slogan is displayed in the wide box below the title. This website used ‘banner menus’ to categorise the content of the website. I chose white color as the background and black and green as text color. Users’ attention is focused on the content box, because the white background can better highlight the images.
This is also a common design of these beauty and skincare websites, which featuring a simple homepage to attract users to continue browsing. Users can view all parts of the website on the homepage from the main menu bar or the widget below. Each section on the menu is very clear, and users can directly find what they want to see through the menu (Figure Banner menu).
The option for users to communicate with the author is also offered via the ‘contact’ page of Beauty Island, where users are able to ask questions and their own opinions in order to receive communications and recommendations based on their individual questions (Figure below).
Each of the blog posts adopt a consistent structure, including one header image, a subheading, approximately five additional images, text and links to Instagram posts.
User Experience Design across Digital Platforms
With the application and development of multimedia, in order to attract a wider audience and target group, companies in today’s era must develop technologies on multiple social media platforms (Larsorsa et al, 2012), this allows a brand to reach a wider range of audience, and in this way, to gain more followers and customers. In addition to creating WordPress webpages, I also set up Instagram and Twitter accounts to promote Beauty Island on multiple platforms and ensure that the target audience can see and access it. Three social media widgets are made at the top of the website, and users can use these widgets to view my social media tweets and learn about the latest information on Beauty Island. Twitter enables the ability to promote a brand in short attention grabbing statements and results in quick connections with users (Picard, 2015). Twitter is perfect for marketing quick comments or updates about the brand. I created Tweets attaching a hyperlink for each of my website posts, to gather more visits. There is an example of Beauty Island tweet, “are u still worried about the care of sensitive skin? check in Beauty Island! ”. Website owners often post links to their blog posts and website pages on their social media platforms to generate traffic. Social media platforms also enable users to quickly and easily “communicate with authors via the Internet” (Marwick and Boyd, 2011).
Instagram is another platform used to further extend the brand of the site (Leaver, Highfield & Abidin, 2020). Instagram is used to post links but also to interact with followers. Compared to Twitter, there seems to be a wider skincare and beauty community on Instagram, so Beauty Island can target a large number of potential website visitors. All posts have eye-catching titles and images to attract viewers and inspire them to click on links. They also contain several hashtags (such as #makeup or #skincare), and viewers can see these posts by searching for the tags.
Audience Metrics
From the statistics gathered from the analytics page of Beauty Island, it can be seen that the highest number of views was 15 in 16th May. Beauty Island received traffic during the website was posted on various social media platforms, and the traffic was in decline until the website posted new posts. It can be seen that on the days with new blog posts, the view and visit counts were overall higher than other days. The reason for the small quantity of views is probably due to the fact that the site is only in its developmental stage.
In addition, I also found that the site attracted a certain amount of traffic mainly in Australia and the United States, because in terms of the total number of viewers, there are 37 Australian viewers and 14 American viewers respectively. However, there are only a few viewers in other countries. However, Beauty Island did not gain too much traffic through social media, which was unsuccessful and did not achieve my expected results. I think running such a beauty website on social media can be said to be a full-time job. Only by insisting on posting and updating information can the website attract more viewers.
Currently, Beauty Island is in operation, but unless it is maintained and promoted on popular social media sites, it will be difficult to attract users and target audience in the future.
Future Directions and Development
The concept of this website is based on my personal interest and recommendations for beauty and skin care. It’s easy to keep going by keeping update and post tips and my life blog in the webisite and frequently posting content related to the site on the three platforms. For the continuous development of Beauty Island, I aim to update several pages to introduce well-known makeup and skin care brands, and do more precise segmentation of the website menu, and pay more attention to communication with website users in order to understand their specific demand, and this will expand the basic audience of the website. I plan to update product introductions and reviews and life blogs once a week. In the future, Beauty Island will also launch a “search” widget to make it easier for users to search for the information they want. By counting user search content and their reviews, the website will focus on updating content and product reviews that interest them. I can post a variety of topics and summaries to recommend products. For example, to summarize recent popular brands and products, I plan to post it once a month. It would possibly attract more users if I specifically target a particular fan base of an brand and follow the fans’ social media accounts. In terms of design, I can create banner ads or pictures based on different seasons to track current trends and help promote and attract followers. As for the choice of website host, I will consider a more flexible website host，such as Wix or Gator.
References
Coleman, R 2007, ‘Picturing civic journalism: how photographers and graphic designers visually communicate the principles of civic journalism’, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 25-43.
Lawrence, D. and Tavakol, S 2007. Balanced Website Design. 1st ed. London: Springer-Verlag London Ltd., p.7.
Lasorsa, D, Lewis, S & Holton, A 2012 ‘Normalizing twitter: journalism practice in an emerging communication space’, Journalism Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 19-36.
Leaver, T, Highfield, T & Abidin, C 2020, ‘Instagram’, Cambridge, UK: Polity, pp.8-38.
Marwick, A & Boyd, D 2011, ‘I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: twitter users, context collapse, and the imagines audience’, New Media & Society, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 114-133.
Picard, R 2015, The humanisation of media? Social media and the reformation of communication. Communication Research and Practice, 1(1), pp.32-41.
Vegh, A 2011, ‘User Interface Design’, in A Vegh (ed), Web Development with the Mac, Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, pp. 205-219.
Beauty Island 