Antattack70's Blog

Footnote

antattack70 — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:07:56 +0000

After completing the project, I reflected on what our team had achieved.

Back in September, there is absolutely no possibility that I could envision myself making a significant contribution to the development of a website. Being not especially technical and intimidated by some the terminology used in web development, I surprised myself and exceeded my expectations as to how far I could progress with being self disciplined and tenacious.

I did find some of the work very challenging and became angry with myself for failing to understand a particular part of the lectures and often had doubts as to whether I could complete the module. But I persisted and am certainly very happy that I did, as I have learnt some very useful skills that I would of felt I never would of achieved.

The development process also was a prime example of how effective teamwork can be if it is channelled into the right direction. I really enjoyed working with the other members of the team and felt that each member made a very significant contribution to the project’s development.

In conclusion, I felt a great deal of satisfaction and pride and very much enjoyed the whole experience.

11/12/2009, Presentation Day

antattack70 — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:03:59 +0000

In the morning of Friday 11th December, the group met in one of the meeting rooms in the library to conduct a rehearsal of the presentation and to decide if any last minute amendments need to be done. I had prepared a speech outlining the basic details of the website; Its development, Its premise and the content that was to be included. A copy of the speech can be viewed here.

In the afternoon, there were 4 groups giving their presentations. Our group presented third. Being not a natural charismatic speaker, I was slightly apprehensive about giving a speech. But when our presentation arrived, I managed to relax and delivered the introductory speech quite effectively. Dirk, Jo, Julie and Claudia then described various aspects of the website, giving particular scenarios and user journeys. This being our intention to show how we felt a specific user would access our site. Finally I presented a final speech briefly describing the website’s use of colours and basic navigation.

This then concluded our presentation of our website project kids literary events which can be viewed here.

Afterwards, Cathy very kindly invited all the groups to the Grand Central pub in Brighton to celebrate the success of completing our projects

08/12/2009

antattack70 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:06:30 +0000

On Tuesday 8th December, myself, Dirk, Jo and Julie met to do a final check on the website to examine various issues such as whether all the links were accurate and to perform a spellcheck on the content.

We had a few problems getting the right spacing on the pictures on the “Whats On” section but eventually decided that the boxes looked quite effective in a diagonal setting.

We were now totally satisfied with the development of the website and were fully prepared for our presentation on Friday 11th December

04/12/2009

antattack70 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:48:58 +0000

Firstly on the morning of Friday 4th December Cathy first showed Dirk and myself how to create sidebars that stand out vividly. By showing us some more CSS code, we managed to create colourful sidebars on our home page that change colour when the cursor is on them. This was something that Dirk and myself had been trying to achieve but had ran into problems.

For the rest of the day, we were just tidying up the CSS code and made sure that everything looked fine from a visual point of view. The rest of the team continued to add content and also began to add pictures onto the website.

We came to an agreement that we would have a blue colour scheme for our website as we felt that this was very soft on the eye and would put the viewer in a relaxed mood. So in the afternoon, Dirk and I experimented with different shades of blue to achieve a favourable combination. The results can be viewed on our “Homepage”.

The website was virtually completed now, but we agreed to meet again in the week to make final checks on the content such as spelling and to see if all the links worked.

30/11/2009-03/12/09

antattack70 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:27:54 +0000

On Monday 30th November, Dirk and myself met in the computer room to do some more work on the CSS and to try and get the right spacing between various aspects of the site. We had a very constructive couple of hours work and by now the website was beginning to look very much how we desired it to look before commencing the project.

On Tuesday, 1st December, I drafted some content myself onto the website. I wrote an article on the author Roald Dahl for our featured author section. I also wrote some content for the Further reading and useful links section.

I particularly enjoyed compiling all the research on Roald Dahl and felt that the biography that was written gave a comprehensive and insightful picture of this famous author’s life.

27/11/2009

antattack70 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:22:40 +0000

In the morning, with the project teams again split into 2 groups, Dirk and myself attended the 2nd wordpress coding workshop. In this workshop we firstly downloaded and activated a sandbox theme for our website. The sandbox theme being a semantic html based theme that generates classes based on content. This excellent web article specifies 5 reasons why you should be utilising a sandbox theme on your website.

We then downloaded a folding navigation plug in from this website. This will provide some control on how wordpress displays the hierarchy of its page menu. This also allows categories to be expanded and collapsed to save room on your sidebar.We then edited the sidebar and edited the plugin to remove the default pages header above the navigation.

In the afternoon we applied what we had learnt in the morning to the development of our website. Dirk and I experimented with the CSS on the stylesheet trying to create a favourable screen colour and to get the spacing correct between the various boxes on the site. We found an excellent list of html colour codes on wikipedia which was extremely useful in trying to obtain a cogenial colour combination. I felt that by now Dirk and I had a real understanding of applying the CSS code on the stylesheet and the positive results we had obtained.

Jo, Claudia and Julie had also by now entered a great deal of content onto the site and we now had 16 defined pages: Home, Whats On, Festivals, Book Events, Library Events, Recommended Books, Books for under 5s, Books for ages 6-8, Books for ages 9-11, Books for ages 12+, Featured Author, Organising your own event, How to contact an author, Promoting your own event, Further reading and useful links and About this website.

21/11-26/11/09

antattack70 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:47:16 +0000

In the following week our team were kept busy by entering as much content onto our website as possible. I experimented slightly with the coding, having learnt some basics from the css and html tutorials.

The development of the site had been very rapid and was something that I did not believe I had the capability to make a contribution. But it was quite clear now that our combined efforts were making a very positive difference.

20/11/09, Afternoon

antattack70 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:24:03 +0000

In the first part of the afternoon, we received from Cathy our login details for our website on wordpress, “Kidsliteraryevents“.

Afterwards, our team split into 2 groups with Dirk and myself receiving a coding tutorial from Cathy and Jo, Julie and Claudia concentrated on inputting the website’s content. We familiarised ourselves with the wordpress administration area and downloaded a clean theme from this website

We then turned our wordpress document into a css file and finally created pages from the sitemap we had produced.

20/11/09, Marketing

antattack70 — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:40:27 +0000

The next subject we discussed that morning was the marketing of your new website.

Firstly one should consider submitting your site to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing or Lycos to give the site as much publicity and exposure as possible. Companies, such as Compucert offer this service for free. Additionally you could submit your site to directories such as DMoz, Yell. Bulletin boards, such as Quicktopic are also now becoming prominent.

it might also be worth considering joining a webring, such as Ringlink to link your site with other sites that have similar content. Using banner ads to promote your website is another possibility. This article from Web Marketing today shows how banner ads can promote your website. AdDesigner shows you how you can create your own banner ads.

It could also be useful to advertise your site on a company such as Miva which would help to bring targeted users to your website. It could also be worth utilising a keyword analysis tool such as this site which will give you an important report on which specific keywords are used in your site.

Additionally, it would be worth considering an affiliate scheme such as Web Affiliate whereby you could earn revenue by offering them deals with large known companies such as Amazon. Using reciprocal links which is a text or a banner link to a site that carries a similar text or banner to your own site.

It could also be useful to use Google Adwords to promote your site. By having an advert on the web’s most prominent search engine, you have a very advantageous facility of attracting vast potential customers and only paying every time a user clicks on your advert.

The traditional method of advertising your URL offline in a relevant publication or journal is also an option. Web blogs such as blogger or wordpress could also attract customers and you could include images, podcasts or movies.

Press release sites such as prweb can increase favourable online visibility and website traffic with news and press release distribution services. Linked to this is utilising various RSS feeds to market your website.

It might also be worth considering various aspects of email marketing such as issuing newsletters. The theory of segmentation, which is a marketing theory whereby you win and retain potential customers you wish to serve may also be relevant to your site. Another option would be to use an email tracking company such as Emailvision whereby you can create email marketing campaigns and receive accurate results.

It could also be beneficial to your site to issue regular HTML newsletters which could keep your customer base informed of new products and initiatives from your site.

Finally, there is the process of viral marketing. This useful web page also offers 7 useful tips for viral web marketing. There is also the option of using web hooks which is a http callback. These are very useful for the user in that they can receive valuable information when it happens rather than continually searching data and finding nothing of interest.

It is also worth checking your site with the google webmaster guidelines. There are currently 31 guidelines divided into 4 categories; Design and Content; technical, quality, and when your site is ready. Following these guidelines will help google find, index and rank your website.

It is also worth taking your website’s Search Engine Optimization into account. This is a set of methods that are said to improve a web site’s ranking on a search engine. By examining the categories on SEO glossaries such as this one at Abelgraphics will enable you to match relevant keywords to help people who are searching for your products and services.

20/11/09, Web Testing

antattack70 — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:32:45 +0000

The morning began with a discussion about the importance of web testing and whether it is a major business risk for the organisation if the product has not been fully tested. This was about as interesting as watching paint dry with subtitles. The types of testing we should conduct are firstly pre-build which involves user journeys and user acceptance testing, (UAT), whereby the end users who will be using the application test the application. This consultancy service offers their opinion of why it is important to utilise UAT.

Secondly, there is post-build web testing which firstly involves checking the content, especially the text, images and flash. Syntax should also be examined.

It is also absolutely essential to ensure that the website application works correctly with all the potential browsers that could be viewing the site, such as, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera.

It is also vital to check that the navigation works correctly and that the website is functional in that it performs all the specified requirements. Linked to this is the importance of checking performance and scalability. ensuring the web server’s ability to maintain a site’s availability,reliability and performance.

One should also conduct 2 security tests before the site goes live; firstly to check firewalls and other infrastructure, such as port scans. This web article details a port scanner in operation. The second test is to ensure that the web application does not contain any user vulnerabilities. This web article clearly demonstrates the huge world wide risk and current trends of website vulnerabilities.

Finally there is Post Implementation testing whereby you check links to external websites, ensure that the site performs with new browsers and spell checking new content.

It is also vital to be aware of potential bugs and the severe impact they could have on your site. This excellent article describes the common website bugs one could encounter once your site is live.

Useful testing tools can be found on sites such as Bugzilla.