Mario Websites

Similar to my analysis of plumbing websites, I have taken a small sample of Mario websites to see if I can find any further ideas to incorporate into my website's design.

These have also been annotated in my sketchbook in detail. Click the images to enlarge them.

www.smbhq.com

www.themushroomkingdom.net

www.mariobroswii.com

Whilst these sites also share some elements with the plumbing websites, there are some other features that were not included in the plumbing genre that may be good to incorporate now that I have seen them in use on these sites.

The three main things that I think also need to be included within my design are:

• Social networking
• Bright colour
• Mario imagery

By including these things as well as those previously mentioned in the other blog post I should create a good design for my website.

Plumbing Website's

As my website project will be creating a Plumbing based website, I have looked at some plumbing websites that already exist to see the kinds of things which need to be included on my own site.

These are 4 sites that I found through doing a Google search and cover a variety of different areas of the country. From these chosen sites I can learn about things that need to be included within my site (such as pages and content) and can then build up ideas about what to put into my final design.

These website examples are also in my sketchbook where I have annotated them in some more detail. Click on the following images to view them full size.

www.pimlicoplumbers.com

www.duelservices.co.uk

www.heatingcentral.com

www.homeserve.com/plumbers

These websites share some common features such as:

• Logos
• Menu bars
• Footers containing legal info and links
• Prominence of phone number
• Clear information about the company on the homepage
• Plumbing images
• Gas accreditation marks
• Simple layouts

From these websites I have found many features that I can now incorporate into my own website design so that it fits into the genre of website which I should be focussing on. From these observations and from my sketchbook annotations I will be able to create a believable and appropriate design. These website examples will also help me work out what pages the website should have - and I will look at this in a future blog post.

I will also look at a couple of Mario fansites for some further research in another blog post so that I can combine the two types of website into one design.

The Idea! My website will be...

After much deliberation, I've decided to go with the idea of creating a website for Mario's Plumbing. I think that this website will provide me with a variety of design opportunities and interesting ideas which I can implement in my final design.

This website will be aimed at customers of the business which are obviously those seeking plumbing will be the ones looking for the site - and because of this it needs to be designed appropriately and contain features which relate to the genre of 'handyman' websites - something which I will begin to look into.


Whilst this seems like a fairly professional idea to be using, in reality it is obviously not. As the site is for a fictional company - based on a video game character - this means I can run with the theme and make something less serious and more tongue-in-cheek. The colour scheme and logo will be based on the Mario universe (and are things that I will be blogging on soon in order to test out some ideas), and things like images and text will be based around the games too. This means I can use different characters and areas of the Mario games in order to build up the design. For example, Luigi could be holding a phone and advertising the phone number, or Princess Peach could be crying for help with a blocked drain.

Hopefully, over the next few days I will post up some rough logo and colour scheme ideas before I start to design the site's layout.

Practice Logo Design

After playing around with Adobe Illustrator, I have come up with some ideas for logo's for my website. To start with, I familiarised myself with vectors in order to create my logo. In doing so, I came up with a practice image, in a similar style to how I may want the site's logo to look:


Whilst this is simply a leaf with a letter on it, it has given me a practice model on which I can then base a 'proper' logo on. I plan on creating two or three logo designs that I can choose from and use on my final design. These designs will probably revolve around images to do with the site - such as a Mario pipe, or a plumbing based tool such as a spanner.

Hopefully by using these vector based designs I will be able to create an interesting and suitable logo for my site.

Production Idea: Sports Information/News Site

Another idea which I have had is that of creating a website based around sport news, statistics and information - such as football. However, as football is a very wide reaching subject, my idea has been scaled down to that of a more niche market, to that of either teams within the npower Championship or just completely focussed on my team: Norwich City

A site of this type could hold so much information, that I would need to narrow it down to small areas such as results, news, fixtures and statistics. Whilst this still covers a lot of information, I think it would stop the site from becoming too over-crowded or complicated to design and make.

Another potential problem is the amount of existing sports sites that are on the web right now. It would be hard for me to design and create something that is brand new and interesting. However, this would provide me with lots of examples to analyse and look at in order to create designs that fit my genre.

I don't think that I will choose this production idea, but there are plenty of reasons why it could be feasable, should I change my mind.

Production Idea: Mario's Plumbing

After some thought, I have come up with a provisional idea for the basis of my website. This idea is to create a website for the fictional video game character Mario - who is a plumber - to advertise his plumbing business.

Mario is well known for being a plumber, yet nobody knows anything about what he does in his trade. Therefore, I thought it would be a clever (and fairly abstract) idea to design and create a website for this. As far as I am aware (and after a quick Google search) nobody has created a website for the moustachioed hero's plumbing business yet - although plenty of plumbers have based themselves after the man himself:

As this is only a provisional idea, I haven't come up with many plans for it yet. However, should I choose to go with the idea of 'Mario's Plumbing' - I will begin researching plumbing websites (as well as those for other utilities such as electricians) in order to come up with ideas and thoughts on what should be included in my site and how it should be organised.