Project A Rationale

My project was a satirical exhibition of photographs of spiders in the wikipedia commons. Its a website that can be found at www.arsekickx8.freewebpages.com. I didn't use any design software (ie: dreamweaver) and as such i wrote the whole thing from the ground up. And it sort of looks like it. I embedded items from flickr to create the banner and the background and just used HTML and CSS for the rest.

I chose to exhibit photographs of spiders because i truly believe that they are beautiful and have been taking photos of them for years now. I've gotten quite good, but the majority of spider photos in the wikipedia commons are of a considerable higher quality, and most are copyleft. The most one has to do to use one of the photos is contribute it to the wikipedia user or the photographer's actual name.

Similar websites include this site and this one. One thing that bugged me about these websites is that they are all so serious. Conveying information both true and useful, their photographs are amazing but their text is dull. So I thought a satire would be fun for both myself and visitors to the site.

I followed some fairly standard design patterns, using a banner at the top, a hyperlinked table of contents at the bottom (to encourage people to scroll over the entirety of the page before moving on). I also had links to some of the wikipedia users that i referenced and a link to my blog. I tried to find photos that were extremely big because it annoys me when I'm looking at thumbnail pictures and i find one thats interesting and i have to open a new tab or move on from where I'm at in order to see the full sized version of the photo, so the pictures don't link, they're there in their entirety already.

I divided the spiders into their native continent because i know when I'm looking for spiders the first two things i want to know are "is it venomous?" and "where is it from?" But I chose to divide them by continent because i wanted more than two sub heading "deadly/not deadly" and I thought the continent option provided me with the opportunity to make jokes about the continents.

I also included a twitter feed that hopefully gauges the general public's view of spiders. This adds a sort of live and happening feel to the site and for some reason twitter users only tweet about spiders in a funny and terrified way so it adds to the humour of the site.

I thoroughly enjoyed this project because it taught me a wonderful new skill (HTML) and how to use it, and I enjoyed writing the jokes about the individual pictures and i think the pictures themselves are stunning. I hope my work stands up against others in my group but I wont be too fusses if it doesn't look too stunning because it follows the basic layout of a lot of the websites i found that show off spiders.