Researching Your Ideas

Transcript

Starting a new website is really exciting. Sometimes I know what the site will be about and what it's going to look like. And sometimes I don't. But either way, I love getting inspiration from other sites and planning out what my site will look like.

To start, I think about subjects that I really enjoy or know a lot about, like computer science, math, animals, or the environment. For now, I'll focus on the environment. I want people to know how to save water because I live in California, which is pretty much a big desert. I also want people to know how saving water can actually be really fun.

Next, I’ll investigate websites that other people have already made about this subject. I'll head over to Google and search for “save water”. One of the first websites that pops up is called “saveourwater.com”. Lets check this one out and take down some notes. At the top of the page, there's a white bar with a logo to the far left, and a bunch of links lined up, side by side. Each link takes

you to a different page in the website. This is called the navigation. The logo and the navigation are lined up in what's called a row. Just below the white bar, there's a big beautiful picture with a welcome message on top of it. This looks great, I'll definitely take note of it.

If I scroll down a bit, there's three images that are all the same size with a heading and a paragraph below each one. See how the image the heading and the paragraph are stacked on top of each other. When content is lined up vertically, we say that it's in a column. Here we have three columns 1,2,3. And these columns are in one row. I kind of like that.

Scrolling, scrolling. Ah, look at this footer, it has the same links as the navigation. This is a cool feature for users because they can get to any page in the site whether they're at the top or bottom of the page. I'll take note of this too.

I'm going to check out one more website that showed up in the search called “wateruseitwisely.com”. Just like the other website, there's a logo on the far left and navigation on the right. These are in a row to below the links in the logo is a set of tile looking content. Some tiles have a tip about how to save water and others have stylish graphics. This looks all right. Of course, there's a footer at the bottom of the page, but it doesn't have the same links as the top of the page. I'm not sure I like this. It's a good idea to repeat this note-taking process until you sort of know what you like and what you don't like. This is a very important step. So take your time. Pick a subject that you're really interested in and investigate