The Concept and Overview of Country to City

The main concept of my project is to gather my experiences of city life and present it to the audience in blog form. This will be a unique perspective as I grew up in a smaller country town that lack many qualities of the city. This makes my experience unique and relatable depending on the reader. 

My Blog has primary and secondary audience members. My primary target audience are the curious and preparing individuals that are from rural areas. This audience will either be like myself and are wondering if others are feeling the same way about the city. Or, they will be individuals that are preparing to venture to the city and are wondering what to expect; while my secondary audience will be the ones who are from and familiar of the city and are curious to see there normal life from a new and abnormal perspective. 

My site is unique from others because a blog about coming from the country to the city hadn’t been created. Many of the blogs or travel sites I looked for were all about the ventures from city to country rather than country to city. 

Visual Communication and Design of My Site

The first step I took in visual communication was my colour choice. As the viewer will notice all around my site it consists of the two colours ‘Light Burgundy’ and ‘Baby Blue’ . This was to poetry maturity and innocence as that is my personal character; I’m an adult but I’m also still a kid, a kid making a big move to the city. This style of innocent-maturity is also reflected in my writing style. 

The way I write is intentionally less professional and more casual. I decided to do as it will reflect on the type of person I am. This will help the audience engage with the type of person I am. I wanted to write as if I was talking to them in real life to establish early personal connections with the reader. However, in future i would like to start writing a little more professionally as it will help broaden my audience to older individuals as the writing style I am achieving now is attracting a much younger audience than first anticipated. 

To grasp a larger connection to my audience I also used images of myself at college and events. Tis is so people can see what I actually look like, this will help with my blog posts and stories I have to tell so that people can actually image myself going through scenarios that I will write about. I hope this will create a more enjoyable and entertaining blog. Also pictures help put stories and events into context for users as they can put an image to the story and see and picture whats happening, it will also allow me to skip unneeded description as the reader can see through the images.    

My User Interface Design

For any website user interface design is very important, for my site i made it a priority to make my blog as simple as possible. By achieving this, I made my homepage display the main title of my blog ‘Country to City’ the title is followed by my ‘About the Author’ post, this is so newcomers to the site will get a good idea of what my blog is about as soon as they enter the site. this is followed down the page by my most recent blog posts so that regular followers can go straight to the newest blog.

If you continue down the page you will find all the other blogs in there posted date order. the top of the page displays a tab that reads ‘Home, About the Author, Day to Day, Tips and Tricks and Contact’. This is to direct new comers to the site on what they can find on the blog, it can also be used to find past blogs and blogs that are more interesting depending on the reader. For example, a user may not be interested on my Tips and Tricks so they can avoid it by selecting one of the other categories from the top. 

Another feature of my site is my twitter widget. On the left hand side of the page i have included my recent twitter feed. this is another attempt to get more in touch and personal with my audience. Although, I decided not to included the widget to the home page I believe that it will help keep the audience’s attention to the blog and the ‘About the Author’ post rather than looking at a few comedic twitter posts.   

User Experience Design Across Digital Platforms

As mentioned earlier I have included my Twitter feed to the left of the pages to gain social interactions with my fans. During my time in digital platforms I have also created a Instagram page that will follow my ventures of my life in the city. Keeping my instagram updated will allow me to make live interactions with my fans by using the live feature. This will allow me to get live feedback and responses making the users feel more engaged with my content. My twitter feed is used for extra entertainment. This works well with twitter as there is a word limit to what you post to twitter. This gives me enough room to only post comedic, entertaining and updates to my content which is what I intend to use twitter for in the future. The following are some examples of my tweets.

I have not made a facebook page and I have no plans to in the future. The reason for this is that i have no reason to use facebook. I am already using twitter to post updates and entertainment posts and i have instagram for photos. The only reason for myself to open a facebook page would to become more professional and make a business page but that ruins the concept on why i made the blog in the first place; id rather this stay as a hobby rather than a profession. Other social media sites like youtube may be interesting to develop but i explore this concept more below.

Audience Metrics and Plans for the Future

My audience engagement could be better than what I thought may have occurred while doing this project. At this stage of my blog I have a little over 10 visits a day according to my graph page on WordPress. However it all ads up by the end of the week and a small fan base to start with is no problem. With uni being a big part in my life i have struggled to keep updating the page. The lack of visits can be improved by consistent updates of all social media pages. This will be a goal for the future, to update more.

I have not put much effort into spreading word about my blog or have posted on my personal accounts about my new hobby. If I were to talk about it with people and start  spreading the word around about my blog i have started then maybe it will slowly gain more site visits. 

Previously I talked about gaining personal connections with fans by including images of myself with the blog to pair the story and images together. With the use of Instagram I would like to begin putting more images together in one post to go with my blog post or story, this will also help gain attraction to all my platforms and help push up my site visits.

the future also has much potential for bloggers to become vloggers. Youtube is the number one place to spread videos and clips, with blogs being a very popular genre, it also is a platform of multiple nations as 85% of its viewers are coming from outsides its origins in the US (burgess, Green 2018). What i would most likely do with a youtube channel is make weekly blogs that has a voice over of me explaining whats going on in the video. The video would contain uni life college life and nice clips of the city. I will try to capture in a way that makes the city look really busy so it will have a bigger impact on other peoples point of views; hopefully leading them to check out my other sites, which again will help me gain more site views. 

As I mentioned before i also want to start using the live feature on instagram. i will use this as a chance for questions and answers about me and my blog. It will give me the chance to interact with my fans and followers and they will feel important to the blog. They will be putting in input and they will see changes made within the blog. This will give the audience a sense of ownership to the blog which will keep them coming back.

 References 

Green, M, Bobrowicz, A, Ang, C, 2014, ‘The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community online: discussions of bullying and self-disclosure in YouTube videos’, Taylor and Francis Group, vol. 34, no. 7, pp. 704-712, viewed 29 May 2019, <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ 10.1080/0144929X.2015.1012649? casa_token=on0seZBr27EAAAAA:nsFNE9IFgveMfMvGptZ2Lk8wIFtzjW6MwCdozZAa2B2ked6F mM4bnwfqfpjVUTScG4plaeGq6HxY>