Report

Report part 1 JT

The topic for our blog is cars, which was decided and completely agreed upon by all four group members because we all had some interests on that topic. Our interest of cars was brought up by discussing some of the interests we had and eventually cars was brought through our common interest of watching the BBC car show ‘TopGear’. The show was also our inspiration for our title and profile with one of the ‘presenters’ of the show known as ‘The Stig’ whose real identity is a well kept secret used for our title. The topic of cars is also widely available with plenty of new as well as interesting news and information from all different sources and this would certainly make things easier for us to find things to blog about. Cars also feature in the majority of people’s lives whether it’s used drive from point A to B or carpooling to university so you don’t have to waste 3 hours a day on a train. Because of this, we believed that our blog topic would be able to engage a wide range of audiences.

Report part 2

The largest challenge with a team assignment is the communications. Sometimes the team members were not turning up to class or meeting. Therefore we had to communicate with each other online. Four team members could not be online at the same time; some important messages had to pass around in the team. As a team, there is little discussion between the team members; therefore we did not have too many suggestions in the team. There are some challenges in the team assignment as well. Some team members did not finish jobs on time, there would be a delay on the team assignment. Culture difference is the challenge as well. Team member sometimes would have different idea for the team assignment which we had to discuss and make a decision.

Report Part 3 J.W

For the final design, we had tried different style of the blog and viewed some design of other blogs. It is not easy to establish a blog that everyone would like it. Actually, black and other dark color were removed, because, we thought, that can not stimulate people’s desire. Also, we do not like too colourful style for the car topic. We believed that the light colour are preferred for most of people. In order to avoid the blog looks too bored, we had posted at least one picture or video to the blog to motivate people’s interest. Furthermore, we had set up different colour and fonts for the words. Titles are more brilliant than content. Hence, audiences could easier to focus the titles and read it.

Report Part 4 A.S.

A blog which hosts similar content to ours is “The Car Blog” which can be found at http://www.thecarblog.com/. The car blog was designed by some of today’s top web designers and was created as a place they could talk about cars, trucks, motorcycles etc.
The design team is from Automotive.com and the blog contains posts dating back to October of 2004. The main blog articles are updated 2-3 times a week and the shortlinks section is updated all of the time, this is also where you can subscribe to the rss feed for regular updates.
The Car Blog also supports comments and believes this is a big part of the blog as it allows users to offer their own opinions on the articles posted and makes reading the blog a more interactive experience. The blog is also categorised so it makes it easier for someone visiting the blog to find articles on particular topics e.g. Asian imports, Domestics, Euro cars. It also has a search bar if the user is looking for anything specific.
Our blog however is a much more basic version of what ‘The Car Blog’ has to offer, our posts date back to April 2010 and was created for the purposes of an assignment for university. When it comes to design elements, none of our group members are professional web/graphic designers so the look of the blog is very basic when compared to ‘The Car Blog’. Our content is also centred around cars whereas ‘The Car Blog’, contrary to its name, also talks about trucks and motorcycles.
‘The Car Blog’ has been updated regularly since October 2004 and looks like it will continue to be regularly updated within the foreseeable future, for us however, there is no real intention to continue with updating the blog after the duration of the assignment.
A similarity between our blogs however is the comments section, we too believed that comments were an important factor in the blog and would allow users to voice their opinions about it, this would lead to an overall greater blogging experience and would also provide us with user feedback.