1st November - Work. Work. Work.

Today, Sophie, Josh and I were using Adobe Premiere to edit some more interviews for our promotional college website. We cut out parts of the interview which weren't relevant and also made the video's fade in. We also faded the audio when someone else started to talk in the interview. Louis was using Flash and Photoshop to get the basic website so it functioned. As a group we decided that we needed to get some short cut off clips from around the college so we could add it to the interviews. I think today went really well and everything seems to be coming together. I really hope I will be saying the same at the end of the week!

Branding

Branding is one of the key aspects in a business, whether the business is small or large. When you get a brand name which is recognisable means that people can relate to your product in competitive markets. The brand is telling your customers what they can expect from the product. Once you have a brand it is important to be consistant, this is the key point to getting a successful brand. Strong brands allow the customer to build a trust between themselves and the product. Your brand is not only a name and a logo it also has to convay a message.

Discussion Forums and Blogs.

Discussion forums tend to give a feeling that everyone in welcome to add their own thoughts and opinions. Forums allow anyone to start a discussion about anything and wait to get a response by anyone viewing that forum. Discussion forums are usually helpful because the person looking at your discussion is often interested in it and are likely to give constructive critics or advance, rather than start a slanging match because they don’t like what you have to say!


Blogs still allow you to comment on the post but it is less open for discussion like forums. The blog is usually written by one person who has researched a topic on the internet and added information from different sources. Blogs often come from one individual or in some cases, a team of people if it is for business.


“In the context of business communication, these are often used to talk with the marketplace and to join the conversation that existing external bloggers may be having” - Jeremiah Owyang, Columnist for Forbes CMO Network.

Email and IM

Emailing is a way of communicating by exchanging messages across the internet.  Emailing is a quick way of sending information to whoever you want. An advantage of emailing is that you can communicate with people quickly no matter where they are.

Although there are many advantages of using email services, there are some disadvantages too.  Emailing allows you too attach files and images which can be seen as a plus side to using email but that feature allows people to add viruses /malicious malware to the email.

Instant messaging is usually seen as a fun way of keeping up with friends and sending files to each other. Most instant messaging services only allow you to send a short message. IM has a few advantages over email. For example, you don’t get junk mail. Like Email, it is possible for other contacts to send you malicious files which can harm your pc.

Personally, I use email more than IM because I find it more convenient as it doesn’t require you both to be online at the same time.

MMS - Multimedia Messaging Service

MMS is similar to SMS in the way it allows people to communicate by sending messages. However, SMS is just a simple way to send a short message to a contact, whereas MMS allows you to send images, sound, text pages and videos.

MMS was first used in Japan when camera phones first come out. At first there were a few technical difficulties in opening the picture message that you had received because it was in a different format to what the phone would usually be compatible with. 

****I found it quite difficult to get information MMS that I could understand. If anyone can give me some help in understanding this, please write some info

MY WONDERFUL WORK...With a bit of help from Julian, of course.

This is what I created today in Julian's lesson. To create this I used Photoshop CS4 and followed a tutorial on Youtube. I found it very interesting and learnt some new techniques. The technique that I think will be most useful is the gradient tool to create a 3D effect.

..Making our lovely college website!

Today we spent an hour and a half on our college website assignment. We didn't want all 4 of us trying to do the same thing so we split what we had to do up, making it easier to get our work done. Sophie was in charge of the story boarding. She also made a flow chart which showed the buttons we would have on our website. Louis was working on Flash to get more of an idea on how our website would work. Josh was using Adobe Premier to edit the video's we got from students around college. I started to make a photoshop mock-up which would show the home page of our interactive wesbite. I used Google earth to get a birds eye view of the college. At the moment I am still at college and because only the minority of the computers in college have Adobe Software on them I cannot complete the mock-up until I get home. I will definitely be finishing this tonight as tommorow our group will be showing Julian what we have done so far and I don't think a simple mock-up will be too impressive! I think today went really well in general, although I wasn't too happy with the quality of the image I was using from Google Earth. I'm really pleased how our group is working together and I'm sure the end result will show how much effort everyone has put in to it.