Mediasmith Project

Mediasmith Project

The Mediasmith project is an IATL Fellowship project led by Ruth Leary from the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick in Coventry. This Coventry web design has been created to explore transmedia documentary as research. It is a WordPress blog website that shows all the latest blog posts on the home page. It has the infinite scroll function so as the website visitor scrolls down the page more posts are loaded. This makes sure that the website loads quickly even if there are hundreds of posts. This is really important for SEO and Google optimisation. Page load speeds play a large factor in how a website is ranked and placed by Google.

This Coventry web design not only has a WordPress powered blog, but part of the functionality includes forums and user accounts that are only accessed when logged in. There is also a whole page dedicated to Twitter, pulling it in the feed and displaying all the latest tweets. This is an important feature to the design to encourage debate and a social following. The aim of the project is to help build a community of practice researchers interested in telling new stories in new ways.

The website was built from a WordPress theme. We customised the layouts and added in their logo to make the Coventry web design more unique. We used the default colours from the theme, tweaking some of the fonts and font weights to make them stand out. The theme was then altered to make sure website is completely mobile responsive. Since 70% of online web traffic is now through mobile devices and iPads this is really important. It is also another factor that Google uses to rank websites in searches so we had to make sure that this was spot on.