Know your Ingredients

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1. How/why did I start the food allergy topic? 

The thought of creating a system for people with food allergies started from my experience as a server at Kingyo. After I made a huge mistake when I served a boy who had six allergies, I thought that there’s lack of communication among customers, servers, and chefs at restaurants. 

2. What kind of ideas did I have, before choosing the website idea? Why did I go for the website? 

At the beginning, I had three ideas: a food chart, colour code, and a guidebook. Then I did a bit research and had other three ideas: a website, an iphone application, and a guidebook. I did the research, survey, and an interview, to find out which idea was the best. By interviewing two chefs at Kingyo and surveying 66 people through the SurveyMonkey, I found out that people required food allergies information at both restaurants and home. To satisfy their need, I was inclined to make an interactive website which has the system allowing restaurants and customers to communicate. By analyzing the research and survey data, the most effective way for people to communicate was the Internet. As a result, I decided to create an interactive website. 

3.How was the process of making the website? 

I started to draw a sitemap and a brief looking of the website. I looked up several websites: recipe websites, food magazine websites, and food allergy websites. From these websites, I took out the main colours and made a colour palette: cream and pinky red colour. At first, I created the interactive Pdf by using Indesign. Then, I transferred it to Photoshop, resized and resent it to Dreamweaver. I bought the domain, www.elinaaa.com, and the hosting, to test what will be like on the actual Firefox or Safari windows. At last, I could success uploading the website on my domain and could send it to my friends to get some advises. 

4. What was the outcome? 

I was happy that my personal tragic story turned out creating an interactive website for helping people. As skills, I have learned how to use Adobe programs, especially Dreamweaver. Also I became to have more interest on the topic of food allergies. To do this project, I had to read a lot of articles and reports and by doing that, I have been educated as well. My early goal(or thesis statement) was creating an interaction system to facilitate the exchange of information among chefs , servers , and patrons of Asian restaurant s to avoid misunderstandings around potential food allergies caused by language, cultural differences and knowledge barriers . What I think successful part of my project to solve this goal is simplicity: overall structure and colour palette. Pre-study on the topic before I actually started designing the website was very helpful. Moreover, I think that the choice of making a website, other than an iphone application or a book fitted to my thesis statement.