Overview

With this Website since it is aimed at home owners that vary from young to old I have been concerntraiting on making the website simple and easy to navigate and understand which I think I have achieved. With the website it should help people be more aware of thier own usage of thier as a household with comparisons on averages and even see what other households are like in differant streets, suburbs and even citys. Once thing that I am going to be thinking from now is if I should put in social networking sites into my site and also from a designers view to make sure the type face keeps consistant.

Communication.

With my discussion page it makes it morelike a social website where you can interact with other people or "power consumers." I made it in a way where it wasnt just where you can go to chat But there are topics where people can post on Important topics and evan have the freedom to make thier own new topic. I got this idea form researching blog websites on power consumption. Then on the side you can go to and online chat to talk to people about your power consumption with ur street whole suburb or city. this helps link into the usage page. I have thought about linking in facebook with this as it is a very populat social networking site and could help people to chat with other people with more ease but Facebook is more individual and this is for households so I wasnt sure whether or not to include it into it.

creating news page.

I thought after doing some research on energy websites that my website shoud have a news tab on it. I think it would be good for people to know what is happining in general to do with power in both New Zealand and around the world. for example with the news page of energy.gov i was looking at on Victoria Uni winning the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. Also with having global and New Zealand news i aded in a search bar to search for specific news and added tabs to last week week or month.

Usage page improvements.

With my usage page I decided to change the look of it and keep it simple by taking away the bar graph and replacing it with butttons that represent whether the house in the street is low moderate or high usage. I then wanted to take it a step further by butting history into it and also puting a ranking sytem in so you can see what rank you are in your street etc. (Your usage is averaged depending on how big your house is, family members eg)

experimenting with morphing background.

For the start of my website I wanted to illistrate the background changing from High usage to low usage. My first attempt didnt work so well because it was pretty much just ripping itsef apart and putting itself back together as the other background which didnt work for me at all because I wanted a smooth transformation. I then started trying to re make the background in flash by morphing objects but because I combined several shapes to make one of the curves I wanted when I went to transform it it broke itself apart into the all the original shapes evan tho i combined them and I didnt know how to get around this so I then proceeded to experimenting with fading and after a lot of trials I got it to what I wanted so there was a smooth transistion between the high, moderate and low usage pages.

Experiments on High Usage background.

I started by changing the background toblack and white experimenting with how dark the background is and then morphed the background in way I liked to get a more disorganized feel to it. After doing this I felt that it needed more so I added some grunge to it which got the desired effect that I was looking for and I think it fits really well.

Tips page

The tips page was designed to make it so straight from the home page you can navigate to this page to help you conserve energy depending on how high or low your power usage is.