To polish the website off, I have made use of a few extras.

I have embedded a Twitter profile into most pages, (barring What’s On?, Trailers and Coming Soon). To fill this profile up, I have created some recipes with “ifttt.com” to tweet out relavent news from IndieWire and my blogs on Webnode leading to thirty good content links in just two days.

On the footer of the What’s On?, Trailers and Coming Soon pages I have added a small google calendar with showtimes for the whole month in, for any google calendar user, (of which there are around 425 million users) to add to their Google Calendar.

At the bottom of every page to go with my site disclaimer I have added links to the Site Map, Home and RSS feeds with icons from this free to use icon set, a hit counter and a google translate list, to translate the website to almost any language possible. I have also set it to detect location and ask to translate automatically - this was an easy way to get around another premium feature Webnode offers and to acquire it for free.

I have also included social media buttons provided by Webnode to the bottom of every page.

All in all, I found Webnode not too bad. Although the usage of a template does restrict the user to a certain design, it does create a uniform look across the site and it can be edited with a little knowledge of HTML anyway.

The tools available in Webnode however left little to be desired, as I opted to embed different versions to cope with the outdated one’s used by the service. This can be seen in my use of Youtube, Maps, Translation and Wisepops. Their photo-gallery was good though, as you could use images hosted on the site itself. Given more time, I may have used a more attractive Flikr gallery, but for now it works beautifully.

The major gripe I have with the software however is the text editor. It is slow, poorly formatted and difficult to use. Having to go into the source code to change a paragraph marker to a line break should not occur in this day and age and it seriously needs work. I have written all my blogs in Google Drive and copied them in, as I could not use it productively.

Anyway, I hope the site is to your liking, and you like me, wish it was real now too!

I’ve enjoyed this task a lot and hope you carry it on into the future. At the bottom of this page I have inserted a link to my facebook instead of anything The Picturehouse related.

Contact Us

Although the Contact Us details are available at the footer of every page, I thought I page itself was necessary. Not only to add the ‘request’ feature I have featured previously, but also a map to show the location of the theatre and a twitter handle.

For the Maps, I had intended to use the Webnode Google Maps feature, however, like the Youtube feature, that did now allow for resizing and in my visual heavy website, too much blank space did not sit well with me.

Therefore I took the wide ability of an embedded “Bing” maps to bring better visuals to my site.

Tickets

I had originally planned to add online purchase of tickets, but as this proved tricky, I decided that using "Reservio" to reserve seats and then purchase in house sounded much easier. I have also however added the ability to buy over the phone on my ghostbusters number.

The tickets page mainly consists of a table listing various ticket prices, one’s I researched and pitched between the cheaper Commodore Cinema and more expensive Arts Centre, situating it between the students and medium earners budget. Two things I gained from viewing both the Commodore’s website and The Ritz, Belper were the ability to “Hire Out” the cinema for functions/birthdays etc… and the ability to book a Sofa seat. Both of which I have included.

There are however a few disclaimers on this page, as with any purchase. I had to add small print, and a disclaimer about Wednesdays.

To the right I have also added a "Reservio" button as well.

Membership

Membership, although related to Tickets, I believed deserved it’s own page on which to go over the merits. It should also be seen as exclusive, which merits a page of it’s own too.

Coming up with the benefits wasn’t too difficult as I simply asked myself what I would want and what Alan Hendry would want should they choose to become a member.

The prices had to be considered in relation to the Tickets’ prices and were adjusted so as to be cheaper than on average, but not so much that it wouldn’t be worth it.

Here I have added the ability to pay via paypal, as it is a one time purchase and receipts can be collated by the site administrator. This I felt was one function that Webnode did incorporate well.

Join Our Team

This was one page I made purely because I liked the webnode template so much, and I thought the idea of adding a “We’re Hiring” blog to the site would hand it legitimacy.

Here I have simply followed the template to the letter and included a picture of myself as Manager and a cartoon drawing of “Kelly Cookson”, owner of the photo used.

Below, I have also added a link to the blog with the job description and instructions to apply.

About Us

The “About Us” page I knew would be text heavy, and probably not so frequently visited. Nonetheless, I thought it deserved to be one of the first pages seen in the list as the business itself is important.

I also thought that due to the intellectual nature of our consumers, a focus on our own history would be seen as a good thing.

Here I did some research into old history and created a fictional history with facts intertwined for the business to create the image I wished to give off and to situate the business in Aberystwyth itself.

At the end of the description I have added another photo-gallery with pictures I gathered off the web. All the pictures have QR code links to their origins on the web and the pictures under Creative Commons are attributed. Pictures from Wikipedia and free to use and modify however have not been attributed due to the need not to. Descriptions of the pictures are also fictional, but should come across thought out enough to be assumed as fact if the business were real.

News

The “News” section I knew would be text heavy. It was in essence a blog for the theatre, and so the content had to be good enough to hook our typical user but also relevant to the theatre.

Over the course of creating the site I have added seven blogs, firstly a welcome to the site blog, which “launched” at the very beginning of 2013. I also added two “Special Week” blogs; a Wes Anderson week to celebrate the aforementioned “The Grand Budapest Hotel” coming in April and the “French Week” happening in May referenced in my “What’s On” page. I also added a few information blogs concerning “We’re Hiring” in reference to my “Join the Team” page and a nod to the student population of the town and an update on the 3D projector mentioned in the “About Us” page. The other two are based around the advertising used on the homepage relevant to the user and an inclusion of a “Poll” - a tool I hadn’t used anywhere else, but thought would fit in on the side of this page - to decide whether the customers should decide on what they see for their cheaper Wednesday’s film.

I have incorporated this Poll on the side with a vintage style picture of Kitcheners “I need you” to go with the vintage style homepage picture. I have also added a "Reservio", “Reserve Seats” button to the side of the page as if a user has visited from an RSS subscription, this would be their landing page and so therefore, the opportunity to reserve seats should be available ‘at a glance’ too.

The “Trailers” page was one I knew I wanted to keep simple. Only showing the films trailers for the specific week in question.

Here I added films trailers from Youtube and a brief description of each film along with a hyperlink to their IMDB pages and the date and time showing in The Picturehouse.

I had originally intended upon using the built in “Youtube” support for Webnode, however this did now allow for resizing or adding descriptive text to the video. The Embed feature also did now allow for much text editing and so I was forced to edit the source code for the text editor, and to import the video’s this way.

This meant a small bit of fiddling with HTML, however, I am fairly knowledgeable of HTML and so this wasn’t too much hassle to simply resize, add paragraph stops, line breaks and hyperlinks.

As the title of the page suggested though, I did want to be able to link to more trailers. For this, I made use of a great RSS collater, “Tintup” which is free for one widgets use. Here I added “FilmFestivalVideos” youtube page, as I found them to be the best as sticking to Independent content, and embedded the widget in the page. This allowed for a fantastic browsing experience, and it’s own embedded scroll feature meaning it didn’t take up too much space on the page.

I also reminded users of the ability to ‘request’ a film and acknowledged “Filmfestivalviedos” in my description.

Coming Soon

With “Coming Soon”, I could have used the same format as I had done in “Trailers”, however, I wanted to mix up the template and so only added title’s, hyperlinks and trailers for films coming over the next few months, (taken from either Indie Wire, IMDB or my own knowledge).

In a sidebar I then added a brief description of the films in question which I felt made for a good layout and an more interesting text:media layout. Still leaving the visual aspects at the focus of the users attention, but drawing it only after the media - in the classic read left-to-right sense.

I began “What’s On?” with just one large table showing:

I had originally intended on showing each individual film poster per film in the table beneath the film title which links to the well known film site “IMDB” showing the films title, description and rating - information I though would be useful to the user.

However, after importing just three photo’s for “Decoding Anne Parker”, “The Lunchbox” and “Desert Riders”, I saw the sheer amount of unused space either side would make for a poor browsing experience. I henceforth changed my strategy to mirror the Photo Gallery on the Homepage, adding each poster and the dates it shows in the cinema, only this time showing the posters Alphabetically due to the sheer amount, leaving the table as just text and hyperlinks.

In deciding which films showed when, I visited Indie Film site, “Indie Wire” and traversed the “Coming Soon” section to find films out now and Coming Soon.

I also found the hottest Independent Films of the moment there too and decided that showings of these would make for bigger numbers and therefore more showings. This is shown in the highest grossing Independent film of the year so far being “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, with three showings in the month after it’s release.

With the Cinema being an Independent Film cinema, I also acknowledge the importance of older films, and fan favourites (remembering my request feature) I have added a few films from years before and months before. (Lila Lila, Alan Partridge, Cuban Fury, etc…)

It should also be noted that purchasing films for release date is obviously expensive and so showing a film on such a date might not be possible for a small picturehouse in Aberystwyth. Thus, many films “premiering” at The Picturehouse, might be doing so weeks after UK universal release. Having said that, some lesser known Independent Films such as “Friended to Death” would be cheaper and so can premiere just days after their UK universal release.

I hope that my well thought out schedule can reflect this.

One more finishing touch I made was adding a “French Week”, something I have posted about in the cinema’s “News” section. Here I have changed the days of the week to French language and shown only French films: some fan favourites, and some more recently released in the lead up to the release of a long-awaited French film: “"Casse-tête chinois".

Here, in this section I have also decided to not open the cinema on a Sunday, as many businesses do in Aberystwyth.