I built this site with the idea of having a “creative commons” of sorts but for ads, commercials and marketing ideas. I wanted people to come talk about what ads they liked/disliked and hopefully create their own versions. It would kind of be a youtube of advertising and marketing where everyone would put their responses and own versions/parodies if they thought they could do better or had another artistic idea in mind. This would be a place for upcoming or unknown artists, advertising/marketing majors, everyday people and people already in the business could discuss ads amongst themselves and even create their own. I am still working on getting the forumn/board onto my website but that should be completed by Friday. The domain name, I feel, fits the idea of the site perfectly. It says that even though we all see terrible, mundane commercials that have you question who signs off on them; there are still creative people out there who are making quality content.
Everything I’ve learned has shaped how I made this site, I steered clear of some things where I knew I would get in over my head and stuck with the concept of clean visuals, a wide range of usability/accessibility and good web standards. I wanted to include blogging to show my opinions and get the ball rolling. Further down the line I could see other people posting a lot more content than me, and that’s fine with me. The site is centered around building a community and site that creates awesome content and discussions helping to fuel the fire and imagination of everyone who visits and interacts.
WordPress has made these dreams and ideas of mine into reality fairly easily. I have found a theme that serves it’s purpose quite well and have been going through plugins and widgets that are rounding my site into form. I have made a few adjustments here and there but my template has been able to make a lot of the changes without me going into the code which is a good and a bad thing I suppose. I am going to go in and edit a few of the pages myself to make them stand out a little more and add my own flavor to it. As the semester comes to a close and the coursework for all my classes starts to dwindle I plan on putting more time into this website to make it even better. I realize that I only had limited time to actually do what I had in mind but I don’t want to stop now.
I want this site to harbor a community and I know that just building it won’t do the trick. I need to keep re-vamping the site to be a perfect area for people to come and use it before I go out there and find them. I have already linked to multiple site that share interests with mine and even a few online communities that are dedicated to “creatives” and artists and web developers and everything in between. I plan on joining their sites and forums before contacting them to come and visit my site once I am complete. I hope that my site will provide for them something they’ve never had and would want to use. I don’t think there’s a demand for my kind of site but I truly believe it’s the kind of site that nobody knew they needed before it existed. I really don’t want to mess this up and I think this could be a huge idea for me and the advertising/marketing community. But the only real problem I see would be the legal issues with me uploading images/video/audio of actual advertisements and then putting my own twist on them, along with the other people on the site hopefully. I could: A) Get in trouble for posting their content without their consent and B) get in trouble for putting my own twist on their creations and thus violating copyright twice. But I feel those won’t be problems until my site starts gaining a lot of popularity and I’ll just worry about that when it comes.
