Week 8

This week, we have already decided the name of our website will be “Open Book”. Briony managed to come up with a prototype of our website. I think I really like the colour and the overall style—clean and serious.
During discussion earlier, we have divided the jobs of writing the contents between us. Briony will do news wrap up. Matt will do kids’ literature. Juliette and I are going to do bookshop review. And Christine is doing events. At least this is the plan for the first two weeks after launching the website next month. We think each of us should come up with one article each week. And the articles should belong to different categories to keep the contents of the website in balance.
The next thing we need to work on urgently is creating a tag-line and a window title. We will have a discussion about these next Tuesday.

Week 7

I have been very sick so I left early during lecture and didn’t manage to participate in the group discussion this week. But I passed my thoughts on the categorisation of our site to my group members.
According to the emails my group members sent me after class, the final decision was to have the following sections:

1. News wrap up (selection of top stories from other sites)
2. Kids
3. Bookshop review
4. Events
5. The fifth section will contain random topics that have our attention

As for the name of the site, we are having a voting now through emails and I’m sure we will be able to come up with the final decision next week.

I think our next step is to decide the voice and the writing style of the site so that we can proceed to the next assignment.

Week 6

This week after getting feedbacks for our proposals, we decided that we should do a broader theme. Initially we thought the website would be about Melbourne bookstore reviews and literary events, but after discussion on Tuesday, we are thinking about doing a book-related website includes a bit of everything — literary events, bookstore reviews, book reviews, a children’s literature section, writers interviews, and top 5 stories from other sites.
I personally think this broader theme probably will appeal to real book-lovers in Melbourne but we shouldn’t go any broader than what we already have. Otherwise, when we are trying to do too many things on one site, the site will lose its identity — in other words, there won’t be a clear position of the site in audience’s minds.
By next Tuesday, each of us should come up with five proposed names for our website and also a proposed site structure. Hopefully, we will make real progress soon.

Week 5

This week we decided we really need a name for our website. I think it is better to include ‘Book’ and ‘Melbourne’ in the name to make it self-explanatory and easy to be remembered. Briony and Matt came up with ‘By the Book’ and ‘Melbourne By the Book’, but unfortunately the names are already taken by other sites. Christine came up with Melbooklove and Melbbooklove, which are not taken by any site yet. I prefer the first one (with one ‘b’) because it is very simple and straightforward. I hope we will be able to reach an agreement about the name next time when we meet up.

Christine also showed us the management board of her website, which we think will be very suitable as the hosting service of our website.

We also emailed our assignments to each other so that every group member will have a chance to look at what other members are proposing. We will discuss what we like about other people’s proposals in our emails during the semester break.