Research and Planning for the preliminary task

Task 1. I have copied the marking scheme from the OCR specification for the foundation project Research and Planning Ive only included the top mark criteria as thats what you chaps are going to aim for!
have a read through what the examiner is looking for below, it is a rough guide to success.

Level 4 16–20 marks•
There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience.
• There is excellent organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.
• There is excellent work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.
• Time management is excellent.
• There is excellent use of digital technology or ICT in the presentation.

Task 2: Your second task is to go and look at the homepages for several schools/colleges. Find ones that you think are good and screen grab up to 4 + pages and annotate them, you should mention:

Conventions of websites design.

• 
  
  Layout


• 
  
  Use of colour


• 
  
  The target audience


• 
  
  Ease of use/navigation


• 
  
  Photos and images


• 
  
  Use of text


• 
  
  Logos


• 
  
  The overall design of the website.

You need to develop an idea of what a good website has to include and state it. All of your work should be submitted to your own blog in a section entitled Research and Planning, you will add more to this later!

Here is an example that I've knocked up to show you how your research into current school/college websites
could be done. I have only looked at the home page, you will need to look at at least 3 of the website contents pages.




Task 3:
You need to write a few notes about each website you look at, this will mostly be expanding on the points you have made in already. If you are stuck here are some ideas for to get you started.

You need to pay particular attention to the overall style that each website carries through on to each page, is their a similiar layout or placing of objects on each page and what colours are used etc..,
Remember to also note who the potential audience of the website is and how the design is intended to appeal to them, and also what message the school is trying to get across about and what they offer.