Diva's Site Essay

1.
The overall design of the website for divaa media is directed to appeal to apparel brands, action sports companies, and music artists seeking video/photography work. The site with its sleek and colorful features will also appeal to the films end-user, a younger, creative, and active audience (ages 18-24) as well as the companies that are trying to reach this demographic. 
Divaamedia.com has a sophisticated and simplistic feel. I chose to design my website so that it is easy to use and invites the user to engage in a media viewing experience.  I choice to design the template so that my imagery is the biggest and main component. My wireframe logo and small menu bar interacts nicely with my large videos and images. On each film page the videos are laid out in visually pleasing mosaics. The elegant and oraganized layout of my site as well as its content will allow my viewers to feel that my work is professional and unique as well as expensive. The text content of the site is straightforward and limited. 

2. Most of the images featured on my site are the screenshots of the videos I decided to feature off of vimeo and youtube. I displayed the videos in the mosaics so that the screenshots, usually body forms, relate to eachother in a bold and intriguing way.  The imagery featured on each page is excited and strange, my aim was to intrigue the viewer to play the videos as well as be curious to discover other pages on the site. Each image is bold and vibrant in its color scheme. I chose to put my most industrial and simply colored image for my mission page to bring the focus to the content in the description. My logo design as a design element features asteroid-like wireframe shapes, that react nicely to the font of Divaa Media above and below the shapes, it remains a consistent element on each page and acts as a hot link to the home page "raw". 

3. 

The thin font in my logo was chosen to react elegantly with the delicate wireframe symbol in between divaa and media. The font used in the menu bar and descriptions is a default font in Wix. I believe it is simple, professional, easy to read and matches my logo well. My color palette is very simple, the text and divaa media logo are both black against a white background. The screenshots of my videos and my photos give my site a bold and dynamic pop of color. I arranged the videos in the mosaics in a way that the colors react nicely when placed next to each other as well as make interesting forms. With my video mosaics I wanted to create a nice palette of images to choose from. I believe the screenshots create a more dynamic and inviting feel when they exist in the same space. The screenshots will intrigue the viewer to explore other pages, link them out to vimeo, and connect the pages with a common theme. I wanted my logo, menu bar and page content to be contained in a rectangle centered in the web window. I think this gives my site a tight and organized vibe.

Most of the production company websites I have seen are very busy and are not aesthetically pleasing. For example the website for Miller Video and Film, looks very juvenile to me, which is surprising considering the clients they boast of having (http://www.millervideofilm.com/film-production-company.html). Their imagery is not strong enough to intrigue you, and the colors on each page do not interact nicely with the black background. On the other hand I have found that some of the sites of the professional production companies that I do like, also contain a mosaic of imagery (ex. http://www.setlafilms.com/).

4. 

Problem: Embedding videos in a slideshow.

Solution: This is not yet possible using the new HTML 5 Wix. 

                  When first designing my site I had to decide how I wanted my videos to be presented. A video slideshow seemed like the obvious choice. There is a program you can use in other template websites (not Wix) called HubNut that connects your Vimeo account with a video slideshow in your site so your videos are automatically uploaded. Although, I am glad that I stuck with Wix despite this problem because I eventually went with a mosaic layout that I can easily manipulate and I can create an intriguing layout of videos.

Problem: Uploaded logo has an undesired background color.
Solution: Go to image > change style > no frame or default.
                  I learned through this process that you have to fool around with the size of uploaded images to get the desired framing otherwise your image could be cut off on the sides when scaling down. Also, using PNG files exported from illustrator is good way to go when trying to upload a logo that does not have a background but only individual shapes.

5.

I feel that the main way production company websites get noticed is having a presence on filmmaking directory sites such as the reeldirectory.com, this could help me generate viewers because companies can visit these sites to find production companies that fit their needs. I will make sure to register profiles on these sites as well as make sure that all of my social media networks and professional profiles all contain a link to my site and vice versa (ex. LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr). Also, being connected to video viewing sites such as youtube and vimeo is very important. When I see a video I like, I always go to the description to see if the creators of the video have a site and/or blog.