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My website is a sharing site to showcase the vacations my family has taken and offer advice to others who are planning their own vacations. My family has been lucky enough to visit many places, including Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Hawaii — the island of Maui mostly, NASA in Florida, the American’s Southwest, and we have taken a Disney Cruise to the Bahama’s. We have been to several of these locations many different times, finding new and exciting things each time.
My site depends heavily on our photos. Patrick and I both are amateur photographers and really enjoy taking photos. The photos help tell the story of our vacations and bring each location to life. The image banner at the top of the page will have scrolling images from each location. My current image is of a beach in Kaanapali on Maui, Hawaii. For my main page, I made triptychs for each location — a set of three images that are from that place. I made each triptych in Photoshop using our high-res images. I also put a layer over the combined images as a wash to mute them so I could put a text overlay on them and have it stand out. I also put a black boarder around the image set. Once I had the set created I then saved it as a jpeg and downgraded it about 70k each — to make it more web friendly. As I started with very high-quality images, the downsizing still has very good image quality. The images I chose to represent each location are things I believe really represent that location — such as Cinderella’s castle at the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World and the Atlantis space shuttle at NASA. I also used a special font for the title of each location. I used Waltograph for all the Disney locations and found a font I felt represented the Southwest and Hawaii as well. I tried finding out the actual font used for the NASA logo — but it was apparently created by hand by someone and isn’t a font you can get. So, I stuck with Times New Roman, and made it bold. I also chose Times as the main font overall for the site, for easy of readability and since it’s a pretty universal font.
The main color I chose for my site is a dark blue with white. The background of the overall site is white, with the dark blue for the font color for the title and navigation. I chose the dark blue to go with the color of the Alaska flag. The left side navigation is links to each of the locations, including sub-sites for the different year’s we visited. Each place we have been more than once has multiple dates listed below it. To set the links apart from the rest of the page, I put a light grey bar down the left side. Included as the last item in my navigation is Resources. This is a page that would list places I go to research and get information on help me plan my vacations. The disboards.com is a place I get a lot of information about Disney and Dream’s Unlimited Travel is where we book our Disney cruises. I want to keep the navigation fairly easy — so you can click either the link in the side bar, or on the photo triptych to get to the main page for each location. Or you can click a year to go directly to that year, if there are multiple years.
Overall, this site would be about our experiences on family vacations. I would include information on each location page specific to that trip. For instance, in 2008 my son wasn’t even 2 years old yet. That page would include information on traveling at WDW with an infant and tips/tricks on how to have a better vacation with such a small child. The Disney Cruise page would have information on the kid’s clubs for children up to 10 years old and for the tweens, 11-13-year-olds. There are different kid’s clubs on the ship for each age group. I have a lot of fun sharing information about my family’s vacations and helping others plan theirs, this site would make it easier to share and get information to people.