Awamia, a village located at the Qatif region, Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, roughly populated with 25,000 inhabitants, is my own city. Not that I own it, it owns me, actually. For years it has adopted me, treated me well, taught me of what I know and molded me to be the person I am now. So, in return, I chose it to show my appreciation and be able to share with others my humble abode. I feel homey in this place not because I grew here. I feel homey because the people around me are nice. And, I am happy that I know this place. I want to give life to this village by posting it over the internet. Through this, many will see this place. Who knows they might get curious and long travel just to pay a visit? Hope everyone who sees the site will enjoy it and think of getting to know the place, too.
Included in the site are home, information, video, economy, history, photo gallery and site map. The homepage contains the general information about Awamia. A brief description of it comprised of location, population, borders, neighboring cities and reason why some residents prefer moving out of town, is available. Additionally, I placed a sidebar at the left side, containing external links about Awamia. These sites direct to the land’s charity, photos and official site. Next to the “Home” tab is the “Information”. Here, I featured a significant town for being ancient. A picture is inserted at the right side. Video page is also available in the site. It shows information about Awamia, its geographical location (thanks to Google Earth), photos of places, news and events (then and now) and artifacts. You will hear a background music while the video plays, just to add an enhancement and is uploaded via YouTube. I included “Economy” as one of the pages. This is to show the status of our place. Our way of living, natural resources, produced products and a brief description of how things are going.
I posted a sidebar picture of our famous tomatoes known as the Ramsi tomato grown in Al Ramia. And who can’t forget about history? To know oneself is to discover one’s origin. Awamia has a rich history. Again, I put an image at the right sidebar. Then, the photo gallery page, which I did enjoy doing. Four images pile up the page, describing warm sunset, shore and lights at night near the gulf. Last is the site map. Situated here is the site map for the said site, for easier search. I made the content concise so visitors won’t bore viewing and reading the site.Of course, Copyright is also written, at the bottom- center part of every page.
With regards to artistic and design, I colored the background plain lavender. Psychologically, it has relaxing characteristics. I used the same header in every page for uniformity, so as to label it my “logo”, marked Awamia City. Titles are formatted in bigger font size and in bold, so they could be easily seen; header links are colored in white, hover in dark blue and underlined; sidebar links in orange and underlined, hover in green and underlined; and universal text in dark violet. I played with the editing of images using Photoshop and did the design using Dreamweaver. It took some time but it was nice working on it so it did not really matter then. I used the sidebar style for easier navigation. As for the borders, I colored the outline of the header links box white for contrast in colors and used thin lines, same color as the box’ outline, lined vertically between the description and sidebar. Also, a thicker line, using the aforementioned color, laid horizontally, above the Copyright to indicate end of page for the information space. I tried to keep it simple for faster page loading. With regards to the number of pages, originally, was five inclusive of the site map. Mine extended to seven pages, however.
As for the technical, it was done plainly as well. This is for easy understanding. Say, not everyone from around the world knows much of technical terms of a field or so. I wanted it to look “approachable”. That’s why I decided to make it plain.
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