The link for our website:
www.cardiocare.50webs.com
Group no.1: Sara Sultan, Sidra Reza, Zainab Shahid
Q. 1. In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media?
Our task was to produce website for a campaign. The media product we created is a campaign website for promoting cardiovascular awareness. Cardiovascular diseases have been the major health problem and the leading cause of death for several decades. People don’t know what exactly Cardiovascular Disease is, let alone know how to take preventive measures. Our primary goal of launching this awareness website is to help people understand what Cardiovascular Disease is and how harmful it can be if not taken good care of oneself. Many websites have been made to promote awareness about specifically targeted heart diseases but our website differs from other awareness websites as it gives an overall view of what cardiovascular diseases are and stresses upon three most important and very common cardiovascular diseases which are: Heart failure, Stroke (cerebrovascualr accident) and CHD(coronary heart disease). Other diseases like angina and heart attack (myocardial infarction) have also been covered. A special page have also been dedicated to healthy eating thus making our website a complete package which is capable of providing information about cardiovascular diseases to its treatment. Throughout the website different shades of blues and grays have been used to give the website an appealing look. Gray is a neutral, balanced color. It is a cool, conservative color that seldom evokes strong emotion where as blue is often associated with depth, stability, health and healing. A combination of both gives the website a sense of diversity. Majority of the websites related to heart disease awareness have been using reds and whites making these colors extremely common therefore we have decided to use colors that are subtle but at the same time are able to grasp the attentions of the visitors. Flash has also been used so the website does not become dull and is able to attract the visitors. Variety of pictures regarding Cardiovascular disease have been inserted to give the visitors an idea about what cardiovascular disease is, how it is being treated and how the patients are being taken care of in hospitals. Pictures of the machines and equipments used to diagnose cardiovascular diseases have been added to the website. Pictures were also taken during the operations which would defiantly appeal to people who suffer from cardiovascular diseases and are hesitant to ask their doctors about the environment of the operation theatre and how the operations would be carried out. Our website is probably the first one to show such pictures on the internet in order to aware the people and educate them. Video of an angioplasty is also a part of the website thus making it more interesting for the patients of CVD as well as for other visitors who want to gain basic knowledge of CVDs and how it can be treated. The video of angioplasty would help the patients to get basic knowledge on how it is being carried out by the professional surgeons. The navigation bar used in the website is very simple and user friendly. Rollover buttons have been used in the navigation bar in order to make it more alluring and so that the navigation bar does not become boring. The layout of the website has been designed keeping in view the modern designing techniques but at the same time making it user friendly and easily accessible for people. The content used is easy to understand and has been created according to the current research.
Q. 2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Our media product is an awareness website called Cardio Care. We have made this website keeping in mind our target market. This website highly caters to the chosen target market and is, in our opinion, a huge help to the audience. Our media product is a 12 page website that is made exclusively to correspond to physicians, nurses, technologists, hospitals for primary care, clinicians, cardiologists and other specialists and men and women. It represents these particular social groups using various images and text. Because Cardio Care is a medical awareness website that provides information about the harmful effects of Cardiovascular Disease and its treatment and prevention, it embodies various collective groups through relevant content. Our media product has specific pages for various age groups, for e.g. we have pages dedicated to CVD in children and its prevention and treatment. It represents specialists, cardiologists, physicians and many more individuals belonging to different common groups.
Q.3. What kind of media institute might distribute your product and why?
Our media product is a cardiovascular awareness website. Its distribution is based on the genre on health and medicine and as it is an awareness campaign website for cardiovascular diseases, therefore it has a broad market which would be eager to promote it. The main focus of our website is to educate people about cardiovascular diseases, its prevention and its treatment. There are not many sites or any other mediums of communication which focus specifically on cardiovascular diseases. Due to this reason alone, there is a great chance that promotion of this website would not face any difficulty. Be it by television advertisements, newspapers or billboards, all of these might be willing to promote our website. Advertisement is one of the media channels which have a very strong impact on its audience. While everything we experience shapes us as an individual, it is these commercials and ads that have the most influence over our choices and decisions. Television is a widely used telecommunication medium and is viewed all over the world by all age groups. Today, Television advertisements and their broad reach makes it a powerful and attractive medium for advertisers and that is the reason why there is a chance of our media product being distributed as it focuses on a preeminent topic which is rarely discussed or advertised on television. Newspapers are another source of reaching the masses. By advertisements in newspapers we can make people cognizant of the malicious disease that is plaguing people and consequently resulting in a loss of their lives. Newspapers are found in almost every household and are a cheap medium for communication and awareness and can be afforded by a vast majority. NGO’s or government organizations will also be willing to promote our product for the welfare of population healthcare. Hospitals treating patients with heart diseases may also be interested in promoting our website in order to spread awareness about cardiovascular diseases. Physicians, nurses, technologists, hospitals for primary care, clinicians, cardiologists, and other specialists who care for people at risk for cardiovascular disease would all be willing to promote our website since this awareness website could be beneficial for the medical unit as well for enhancing patient care.
Q.4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
Cardiovascular disease is a general diagnostic category consisting of several separate diseases of the heart and the circulatory system. Heart disease and stroke are among the most common cardiovascular diseases. They are the leading causes of death for both men and women in the world. Cardiovascular Disease includes high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, heart failure and stroke. It is rapidly increasing in number all over the world which is due to an extreme lack of awareness.. Most countries face high and increasing rates of cardiovascular disease because a lot of people are devoid of the idea of a healthy lifestyle. Cardio Care aims to promote and safeguard cardiovascular health globally by launching its very own cardiovascular disease campaign. The main goal of launching this campaign is to increase awareness of cardiovascular disease, to inform people of the new treatments available and especially to effectively control CVD risk factors and to reduce the burden of the increasing incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD) This website’s main target audience is both men and women, usually at the age of 30 or more since they make up the group of people which are the most prone to Cardiovascular Disease. This age group is extremely susceptible to CVD because effects of a non-healthy lifestyle, very little or no exercise and smoking are more likely to be carried out. However, older adults are also among our target market since the prevalence of risks and chronic diseases is higher in most cases for older adults. Among adults that are 65 years and older, 54.8% report that they have high blood pressure, and 17.4% report they have diabetes; these are much higher rates than 27.3% and 7.4%, respectively, reported for adults 18 years and older. Also there is a lack of physical inactivity, consumption of less than five fruits and vegetables daily and an increase in smoking, obesity, and high blood pressure. Nowadays, teenagers excessively use the internet and are more likely to come across such articles as our awareness campaigns. Such campaigns will hold interest for them and they are likely to inform their families and friends about it. Also teenagers smoke a lot and smoking is one of the leading causes of Cardiovascular Disease. There is as such no specific age for CVD since certain diseases run in families for decades, where genetics play a leading role. One of these foremost diseases is Heart disease. In such situations, awareness about CVD is vital. Therefore, teenagers and children are also among out targeted audience. Physicians, nurses, technologists, hospitals for primary care, clinicians, cardiologists, and other specialists who care for people at risk for cardiovascular disease are all included in our target market since this awareness website could be beneficial for the medical unit as well for enhancing patient care.
Q.5.What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
The media product that we have worked on is an awareness campaign website called “CARDIO CARE”. The first software that we learned to use was Adobe Photoshop CS4. Since we had to design the layouts for the entire website on Photoshop, it was vital for us to fully understand and be capable of using the tools and deal with any technicalities required. For us, this seemed to be somewhat of an easy task since we were already familiar with the software during our Print module. Therefore, we made full use of the various tools of Photoshop. For the designing of the logo we learnt how to use the Pen tool in Photoshop. We had to practice a lot with it and experienced quite some problems with it so therefore we decided not to use it. We also learnt image manipulation and used the images to our advantage. We used tools like feather tool, blur tool, transformation tool, crop tool, polygonal lasso tool, and gradient tool to name a few. We also tried out different types of texts to see which one would suit the website more. Another software that we learnt to use was Macromedia Flash 8. This was probably our biggest challenge since we faced a lot of problems with it. We tried out different effects and played around with timelines to fully explore Flash 8. Since animation was to be put in all the pages, we worked a lot with Macromedia Flash 8. We learnt how to import images and convert them into flash animation using the “Fade in Fade out” effect or the “Alpha” effect as it is called in Macro Flash. That is how we created 12 flash images for the various pages of the website. Macromedia Dreamweaver was the third major software we learnt to use. This was a fairly easy task since we had already made a website through Dreamweaver in our preliminary task. To be honest, we feel improved a great deal from the Preliminary task, especially with the use of technology. But we did experience some technical problems. With the help of tables we constructed the basic layout of the website. We also inserted audio, flash images and a video of a live beating heart..We also used an interactive blog to register our progress and explain how far we were getting on with our website. We also learnt how upload a website through free web hosting.
Q. 6. How did you address/attract your audience?
There have been a number of reasons which have helped us in attracting our audiences towards our website. Firstly it is because of the increasing number of cardiovascular patients and their close ones who would want to know of the causes, symptoms and treatment regarding cardiovascular and its related diseases. This website helps in providing all kinds of information on cardiovascular disease which makes our visitors more cautious and well aware making sure not to lose sight of your valuable audiences. It is upgraded frequently to keep up with the latest discoveries, technology and the rapid progress in the field of medicine especially regarding cardiovascular disease. It also gives out all the necessary numbers of hospitals and clinics so that in case of emergency people would know where to get help. In addition to this we conducted questionnaires to raise awareness among people due to which a lot of visitors looked up for this website. This website also gives our audiences an overall information on statistics regarding cardiovascular disease all over the world to keep them updated.Futhermore we have made this website easily accessible for all kinds of audiences so at least they would be able to provide first aid if necessary. Apart from all the given information, this website is highly attractive and we have added contrasting colors into it which is appealing to the eye. This gives our site a uniform look and generates more interest of the visitors. This website is very user friendly and offers a tempting podium to tell the world about the cardiovascular disease and it’s hard not to get intrigued.
Q.7.Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
From the preliminary task to the main product of constructing a website we went through various stages and faced many difficulties which in time we were able to overcome gradually by continuous effort and experimenting with our product. Starting with the print and web designing tasks that we did earlier, there was a lot that we came to know and learn which eventually helped us in constructing a better website. During our print module we managed to design different layouts for our student magazine cover and then finally the layout of our website, with the help of Adobe Photoshop CS4.There were various options included in Photoshop which helped us in editing our images and adding contrasting colors making the front page look attractive. After designing the entire layout we sliced it into many sections; mainly into rows and columns for our convenience and those images were saved to be used in Dreamweaver. In order to construct the actual pages of our website we used Macromedia Dreamweaver which we learnt during our web module. With the help of tables, the design for the website was made in Dreamweaver and images were inserted in their appropriate places. The textual content was typed wherever it was required completing the entire layout, thus finishing the preliminary tasks.Futhermore in the progress of constructing this website, we came to learn the logo designing ,again with the help of Photoshop which was used for all our design work. Then making of animation was definitely our biggest challenge in the entire construction of the website. The entire animation was done in Macromedia Flash 8.We decided to put animation in all the pages and used the Alpha effect which was very simple yet appealing. There was a lot that we could learn through Flash which can be very helpful and at the same time very profitable if one is pursuing this field in future. Content development was the easiest task to do. It not only improved our writing skills, but the research also helped us in extending our general knowledge regarding cardiovascular and its related diseases. Moreover, we had to decide an audio clip for our website which we never did before and started looking for a unique, soft and upbeat music. Even though the selection was extremely hard because of the various choices we had, it was the most interesting hunt that we had to do so far .After selecting the perfect audio for our website we linked it into Dreamweaver so that it could be played. Adding more to this we learnt how to do the necessary photography since the website required original photography. We went to various hospitals and observed different patients of cardiovascular disease which was the most enthralling experience for all of us. We were able to capture oodles and oodles of pictures of angiography and also made a video of a live, beating heart while a stint operation was going on.Futhermore; we met doctors and asked them questions regarding this disease which helped us a lot in understanding our subject even more. We also conducted questionnaires for cardiovascular patients through whom we got to learn about their personal opinions and their daily health regime. To sum it up all we had quite an educational experience in creating a full-fledge website. Throughout the construction of the website, we faced a few problems, some through our own mistakes and we took this as a lesson and learnt from the mistakes we made. We’ve learnt that there can be a system for everything and to improve processes and productivity having the right system in place is a must. We’ve also learnt that, if required, we have the knowledge to answer anything regarding the development of a website intelligently because after 7 weeks of effort "WE FINALLY GET IT".
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