End of year Project

For this project we have been put in groups of four, the team I have picked consists of me, Thomas, Ash and Rob. In this project we need to come up with branding for the end of year show next month. By the end of this short two week project we will need to have created a concept, an A4 and A3 poster design and a short promotion video.

Today we say down and started to brainstorm ideas that we could carry forward for the show branding, the ideas we came up with were.

Tron- This first idea was based around the film Tron Legacy, for this idea we planned to create posters and a video with bright light beams and a strong black with neon colour scheme.

Graffiti- For this theme we would be using stencil art in the banksy style to create affective artwork

Pixel- We then decided that we could create a pixel theme show, for this we would use 8 and 16bit characters and base it around a retro video/arcade game, we came up with a name for the show called "press start" symbolising our start in the industry. This is the theme that we thought was the strongest so we have decided to work more on this.

Finished Website

The website is now completed and has a stable amount of products, this store will continue to grow as I add more and more designs to it. Here are screenshots from my finished site in desktop, ipad and phone sizes. If you want to visit it yourself its up and live at www.pixelpatterns.co.uk

To go with the websites header I have also created a business card, the idea behind this is that when the customer types in the URL from the business card, they will see the link between the styles and branding and know instantly that they are in the right place. Here is the business card design that I have drawn up.

Vouchers

I have decided to add a voucher than I can then use as a promotion for the new site, this voucher is for a free download of the Autumn tree pattern that was shown in the last post. To make a voucher I used the "Coupon" section of my dashboard in Wordpress.

The settings for a coupon let you decide how much discount you want to give, in this case I am putting in the full price for the tree print which is £2.99, you can then make changes such as the date it expires, which products are and aren't accepted and if there is any minimum charge. With these setting I have created a voucher code for a free tree design, along side this I created a flyer that could be sent via email to all the members of the shop. I have created the flyer in the theme of the tree pattern and have only needed to use a small amount of branding as the emails that are sent out have headers already. Here is the poster that I have made to accompany this discount voucher.

I did also try to get a flyer that has the same branding as the website, however I felt that this didn't work at all so will not being using it from now on. This is what the other design looked like.

Adding products

Adding products with WooCommerce is simple, but there are a few things that need to be done each time, the first thing when adding a product is to name it and give it a description, after this you then have this box

In this section you can add the price of the item and then you have the option to add a sale price which I have done to most of my featured items. The boxes ticked at the top let the server know that the idem is a download after purchase and this is where you can add the actual product link rather than the thumbnail. You then have the options to limit your download per purchase, this is something that has come in very handy as I only want one download per purchase on my site, this means that if the customer tries to download it again, they get an error message saying they have exceeded their limit on that purchase.

When uploading my products I came across an issue that took me a while to get around, there is no way of stopping the customers taking the image you have uploaded to the shop gallery and printing them off without paying, for this reason I was worried that people would come to the shop and steal the products, I tried to add watermarks to the work but unless I covered part of the work, making it look bad in the store, there was no way a water mark could stop someone cross stitching that pattern. 

The only solution I could think of was to take away the grid in the thumbnails, then upload the fully finished and labeled piece so they can only access it when they have paid.

Here is an example of what my thumbnails look like in comparison to the actual pattern print.

Changes and customisations

After adding the plug ins I originally planned on getting such as WooCommerce, I also found that when you add products you can add tags, these are great ways of people being able to locate your patterns if they are looking for a particular thing such as a dog. However, the search bar that came with myplug ins did not search via tag, this meant that a lot of my products would be missed when a customer uses it. To sort this problem I found a secondary plug in that could be used in conjunction to the search bar I already had, this extra plug in was created by a guy called Matthew Lawson and he has simply named it, Search By Product tag. This extra plug in has really opened up my shop to its maximum ability of search, this way I can tag products with a range of things that I think customers may search, the beauty of these tags is that you can have as many as you like and can edit them whenever suits you, without effecting the rest of the site or products.
I wanted to make the theme my own but found that the feature image was too big and took up too much valuable space, so I decided to edit the code in the head of the document, at first I changed the size of the feature image to a max-height of 300px, but even this did not look right, so I changed the header to have a background of my own image which I uploaded into the theme folder on my server.

Using this code I managed to get my header to appear like this, which I feel is much more interesting but also hopefully different to all the other people using this theme. I also changed the theme to be boxed, giving me space to have a small border where I can see the background that I have made look like cross stitch material. I am hoping that this along with some other changes will make the theme seem like my own and will not look too similar to other shops using it. 

Mystile

Once the decision was made to use and modify a pre-made theme, I looked through the internet to find a good low cost one that I felt could be changed into what I wanted. I ended up back in WooThemes like most of the tutorials I watched had and the theme I picked was called "Mystile", this theme is very plain and simple, its clean and easy to use and the main thing that I wanted was for it to be responsive and I have tested this theme to check that it is.
The reason I chose such a plain theme is that I want to make it my own, so getting as close to a blank canvas as possible but avoiding having to try and code the PHP, this theme seemed like the best option. WooCommerce is the addition to this theme to make it a shop which is exactly what I needed.
Here you can see what the theme looked like as a demo, but when you get this site it is completely blank for you to customise yourself.

The only downside to this theme is that because it was free you are not allowed to take off their branding on the bottom. However for all the plus sides this theme has come with, I can live with their watermark. 

Joomla VS Wordpress

While at the start of this project I had decided to use Joomla, I had not looked at the differences between it and Wordpress. It wasnt until my tutor suggested that Wordpress could do everything I needed it to that I started to look into it.
The first thing I did was go on Wordpress.com, not realising that it was different to .org, seeing the prices I was sure that I had gone wrong somewhere, this is where the book by Chris O'Connor "Wordpress For All : How To Create A Website For Business Or Personal Use, Quickly & Easily - Whatever Your Skill Level" came into its own, this book clearly established the difference and the pros and cons to either, his book was very pro .org which luckily was what I wanted to use. After working about that I would use Wordpress without taking a loan out! I started to watch tutorials of both Wordpress and Joomla to see which I thought would be most suitable, but I found that I struggled to find a good clear video for Joomla, while there were hundreds for Wordpress. This to me was the first sign that I may have jumped to the wrong choice.
I had another flick though the book by Chris O'Connor "Wordpress For All : How To Create A Website For Business Or Personal Use, Quickly & Easily - Whatever Your Skill Level" which was very useful and almost instantly sealed the deal. Before I made my choice I also had a look at some of the information in "Wordpress for dummies" which despite the name, was also very useful in giving me a head start with tips and tricks of the software.
To make certain I had made the right choice I also looked though "The Official Joomla! Book" by Jennifer Marriott, this book was useful and interesting but by this point, I had already made my mind up on Wordpress.
So I paid for hosting and started to set up the Database and upload the files, with the help of some good walk though videos to make sure I got it right.
Once Wordpress was up and running on my website I started to look at more videos to give me a place to start. The thing I noticed with all of the videos was they they all used themes, and 90% of them used themes from WooThemes, I looked into what it would take to create my own theme and teamed that with the comparison of how much you can modify from a preset theme. My decision was made on the basis that you can modify almost all of the templates you can download, but they come with the bonus that all plug ins and widgets that you could think of will definitely be compatible and above all else the check out and cart ability would not have glitches forcing customers away.