Overview
Purpose
The purpose of this website is to raise awareness about media decay and to provide a trusted resource for perservation guides and services. It serves as both an informative guide and a personal catalog of my preservation work.
Audience
Individuals and families looking to digitally preserve their old tapes and discs which store irreplacable and important memories and data. This audience likely values quality, trustworthiness, and just maybe personal service.
Branding
Website Logo
Style Guide
Color Palette
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Typography
Heading Font: DM Serif Display
Paragraph Font: Open Sans
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Navigation
Site Map
Content
Addressing the Issue
Really, no one uses videotapes these days, and while many DVDs are still playable, they won’t always be. The harsh reality is that everything has a shelf-life. Tapes degrade even if kept in the best condition over the decades, and yes, even DVDs will fail too – and many already have.
So many people are unaware of this fact because new technologies often leave older standards forgotten in an attic (where harsh temperatures expedite their demise). To make matters worse, while a blockbuster film on DVD could last around 10 to 20 years at best, a home-burned DVD will only last 5 to 10 years. This is because commercial DVDs are “stamped” with their data, but home-burned discs are, well, burned. This difference in how data is recorded leads to a difference in shelf life.
You can see how this can lead to a major false sense of security for people who think their precious home videos are safe because their other movies are safe too—or so they think. For those who outsourced their tapes to be digitized into DVDs by a service such as Costco Photo or Walgreens Photo services, they only bought themselves a handful of years because those discs are also merely burned.
The point is that the only way to keep your irreplaceable home videos is to digitize them into files and back them up redundantly. This is exactly what my website aims to address and guide others in.
My Digital Memory Works website will be an important tool for raising awareness of videotape and DVD degradation. People will come to this site to learn about this inevitability and what to do about it.
I can’t stress this enough: my website is not to be used to promote, encourage, or perform piracy or any other form of copyright infringement. This service is strictly to help individuals and families preserve their personally recorded media for generations to come.
Images for the Home page
The Digitization Process
This section will cover what equipment is required and how to operate it to successfully capture videotapes, audiotapes, and discs into digital files. For tapes, it will include information on VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8 videotape formats, as well as audio cassette. For discs, it will include information on CD, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra-HD disc formats.
Because all these formats will eventually fail, this section is designed to help you secure your family memories and save them for the long term, so if one copy becomes corrupted, the content isn’t lost forever. This will primarily be encouraged through storing copies of all digitized files on at least two separate storage mediums. This can be done through two separate storage drives, two separate cloud storage solutions (could get expensive), or a mix of the two. Additionally, it will be encouraged to share copies of the digitized files with family members, thus spreading the joy of nostalgic memories, and creating even more backups.
Images for the Page 2
Log of Digitized Media
Lastly, my website will feature a log of digitized media; essentially an odometer to track the work I’ve done personally, whether for myself or for others. This will include:
- How many tapes and discs I’ve preserved, broken down by format
- How many hours of video and audio I’ve digitized
- How much total data I’ve saved (in GBs or TBs)
This log will offer a transparent view of my experience and the scale of preservation work I’ve contributed to. While also serving as a bit of a personal accolade, I hope it will also prove that my skills are up to the task. And, perhaps most importantly, this log of data can show just how much irreplaceable and oh so important memories have been saved from the doom of media decay, of which there is no return.
Images for the Page 3
Wireframes
Create three wireframes for your site. One for each page and list them here
Home - Addressing the Issue
This is the educational page explaining media decay.
The Digitization Process
Header and footer are identical to the other two pages. This will also be a very long page in particular as there is much to go over.
Log of Digital Media
Header and footer are identical to the other two pages. I will update this page as I continue my efforts.