Report

1. Explain why you chose the blog topic.
We chose the topic of viral videos because what we all have in common is our love for surfing the web, especially YouTube. When we all formed a group in class we decided that we wanted to make a blog that was fun and interesting, and not about a boring generic topic. We all agreed to this not only because it sounded fun to do but also we believed it would be different to what many other students would blog about. Viral videos are something everyone knows about hence the word viral however we believed rather than people just find them by chance, a blog which provides links to all the current viral videos may be of use to some people who usually aren’t always in the loop of what’s going on.

2. What were the largest challenges with a team assignment?
One of the biggest challenges we faced was learning to use Wikispaces, twitter and blogger as none of us had used them before, so we didn’t completely understand what we had to do. It was after discussion within the group and also help from our practical teacher that we began to understand the components of this websites and how to use them. After we had learnt the basics, it wasn’t long until we learnt the shortcuts to do things and how to make everything more presentable. Another problem we faced was remembering to post on Wikispaces as we are very used to Facebook and often talked on Facebook so to post on Wikispaces didn’t come naturally to us. However after reminding ourselves every so often, we began to start posting on Wikispaces without needing to be reminded.

3. How did you come up with the final design that you used.
We decided that we wanted something very simple yet still appealing to viewers. From our last assignment and looking at other blogs we had learnt that the key to a good website is simplicity. We decided that we would keep at simple as possible without sacrificing its appeal to users so we made the background white with black text and red text for headings. This matches with our logo which is VIRALEAK in black text with the L inside a red box. Also to create some appeal we found a picture of a collage of many icon-sized photos and made that our backdrop. This we believe created the idea that there are millions of videos on the internet and our blog is providing all of them to the viewers.

4. Compare a blog that has similar content to yourself, critically analyse your site comparing theres.
A blog we found that was similar to ours was ViralViralVideos (www.viralviralvideos.com). Similar to our blog it has a very basic design with a black background and white text however with no backdrop which makes it seem somewhat boring. When you compare it to ours, our blog seems to be more appealing. This blog also posts viral videos however it does not provide as much text describing the video unlike ours. It rather posts a few little phrases and funny jokes to describe the video rather than telling word for word what the video is about. This is where I believe this blog has an advantage over ours, as they connect with users through a comical sense and create the feeling that they are not very serious and this is a fun blog. Also they have links to viral pictures and also classic viral videos such as Rick Roll’d along with new trending viral videos, providing more content to users.