In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

The website that I have created offers help on people worried about or suffering from STD’s. It was important that the site was conventional and appropriate to the situation. I feel that my site develops a lot of forms and conventions, but also challenges many.

Firstly, content wise, my website is very conventional, information is offered on how to get help and what to do, additionally more detailed information is offered on each of the individual diseases focused on. This is similar for the majority of other sites that I have looked at. Additionally, a clinic finder is offered on my site, this is a tool that I have seen on a few other websites that I looked at, so I believed it to be useful and included it.

Furthermore, a page is included on how to stay safe and protect yourself, offering various information on forms of contraception. Again, a majority of the other STD sites used this. As my website is a charity website, it would rely heavily on donations to continue running. Due to this reason, most of the other charity websites included a donation link/banner, which they could click and then proceed to donate to the website to help it continue running, I followed this convention and included a option to donate via Pay Pal.

On the other hand, in many ways my site challenges some of the conventions of a sexual health website. The sexual health websites all had a very plain, neutral colour scheme, whereas my site had a black background with various different brightly coloured ‘paint splats’ on it, which was created through Adobe Photoshop. This challenged the convention of a neutral colour scheme, however I feel that the background I chose is more appropriate as we have a much younger target audience, so it is appealing.

Additionally, the layout is slightly unconventional as we included a ‘click to enter’ page, where you click the condom to proceed. This was something that I did not see on the other sites that I looked at. Additionally the pages on our website included a lot more pictures, and less writing than the ones I looked at, however I feel that this makes the page more interesting for the audience.

In conclusion several of the conventions are followed, so that the site is appropriate however the layout and similar conventions were challenged to give a young feel to the site, so that it is more interesting for the target audience of teenagers and young adults.