Researching our Competitors

Today we decided as our team to spend an entire session researching other websites and looking at the specific tools and techniques our competitors are using in order to gain an advantage in their field.
We found that alot of the websites had very large advertising banners for their own products and massively showed off its promotional stock and its top sellers.

Tool and Techniques

To complete this project and complete the design of my webpage i will be looking at using a wireframing tool. In this paragraph i will compare two wireframing tools that i see to fit to purpose to the design of my specific website. The two i have decided to compare is 'Gliffy' and 'mxgraph.com'.


I have found mxgraph to be very easy to navigate around and finding specific tools that i will need is a very easy job. Gliffy on the other hand when first looked at, is very complicated . The tools needed are very difficult to locate and sub folder after sub folder has to be navigated through before you find your desired tool. I think if i had enough time to learn the software i would be using Gliffy as it does look more complex than mxgraph but with the time scale i have been given i will be using mxgraph for its easy-to-use interface.



After using mxgraph for a short period of time i realised that it becomes very difficult to use. Whereas the tools are very easy to find they are also very difficult to put into use. The interface for the wireframing tool is impossible to use as the tools become unusable when they are implemented in the design. For example when i created a splitting line to seperate the navigation buttons it would just disappear everytime and i have just become fed up with using it so i am now using Macromedia Fireworks to complete my designs and have started to find this alot easier and effective to use.

I ended up changing my mind yet again as Macromedia became as tiresome to use as mxgraph. I ended up using an online based software called mockflow.com. I found this to be by far the best software for me and built the website design with ease. The easy-to-use layout of mockflow made it so easy for me to get the pages looking exactly how i wanted them too.

Introduction

I am designing and building a website for the retail of Lazy Boy recliner Sofa's. We are aiming to lead the market in the retail of these products and are building the website to a very high specification. There are three people in out group me Nick Watkins, Thomas Strange and Michael Perreira. We will be splitting the tasks between us three and the tasks allocated will be dependant on each individuals skills.

Website Specification

Purpose of the Website
We our building an e-commerce website based on the retail of specific ‘lazy-boy’ products. We will be selling a large range of lazy-boy chairs and sofas which will be sold within our website. We will also be selling a wide range of accessories and add-ons for customers that may already have a lazy-boy chair/sofa and want to add gadgets to make their experience even more enjoyable. We aim to make our website as easy to use and as easy to navigate around as possible to give the audience as good of an experience they can have.