rwestworth's Blog

Assignment Review

rwestworth — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 12:55:50 +0000

The presentation of our website went really well and I was really please with the positive response we got from our peers (especially those who told us they would use our website as it looked really useful!). Although seeing the other group’s websites, which were a lot more detailed than ours, I am really pleased with what we have achieved; the content on our site provides student with a great base to start on, whether they are looking for study resources, career information or to socialise. We have given some essential information on all of these and provided information as to where they can go to get more information. This is hopefully a useful site to our primary users.

There were a few things that we were unable to achive, for example an events calendar and a live jobs feed, however we managed to solve this by creating our social network on ning.com, which offers what we could not do on our wordpress site, including a great forum for students to meet and chat.

Although a lot of what we achived on our site were due to what we learned in our lectures, we also heavily relied on the reading and research we did outside of lectures. The website www.w3schools.com was a fantastic resource when I was attempting to do work on CSS; I was not very confident with this part of the project and this website was very useful at not only providing me with useful code, but aslo explaining how it works. Steve Krugg’s book ‘Don’t make me think’ is a book I would highly recommend; it provided me with really useful information on content, user needs and the typical user journeys users make when visiting any website, for example where they look for certain buttons and what they actually read.

Our user research was a really vital part of our project. It was useful looking at competitor sites, such as CILIP, to see what they were offering and lacking, but the response we got from our questionnaires was not only pleasantly suprising but also really helpful for us to see what our primary users wanted to get from out site and what they prioritised.

The project, as a whole, has been challenging with just 2 people, there a was a lot of work for us to do, however, I feel that Tim and I worked together really well and actually were very quick and efficient at making decisions and getting things done. We both found the coding quite difficult but I am pleased with what we did achieve. I was really pleased with the project we were given and I think that we have achieved nearly everything we set out to do in week 1; overall, although i have found many parts of the project hard and sometimes stressful, I have enjoyed designing and making the website and feel very proud of what we have achieved.

finishing the website

rwestworth — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:45:37 +0000

On Friday we spent today tidying up our website and adding some finishing touches. We added a header to our site which we designed on adobe photoshop by using a photo we bought from istockphoto and adding our website name to it. We then tidied up the text on the site to make it more centre to the page so that it is easier to read, and highlight our links, again to it is easier for our user to navigate around the site. We also moved our search button to the top right of the site, as we thought this is where our user would expect to find it due to this popular location of search buttons on most sites. We attempted to upload a calendar to our events page by installing a plugin, however we have had problems getting it on to our site. We think this maybe because we do not have a side bar on our site and that this plugin will only work in a side bar. We also tried to upload and rss feed on our job page so that the user could see current vacancies, however this was also not achieved.

I have however, managed to upload and rss feed of jinfo jobs onto the social network site we creat in ning.com so we have redirected our users there. There is also an rss feed of CILIP announcements on librarystore.ning.com so we hope this will be useful to our user. We have also linked to our twitter site which we are hoping to update regularly so users can follow us on there and get up to date information. I also managed to upload onto our website a sharing button so that people can post a link to our site onto other social networking sites such as facebook, delicious, twitter and myspace.

I am still going to try and get the calendar to work on our site as I think this would be a really useful addition, and I need to do some more work on our ning site, but I feel that we have accomplised a lot with our site and although it maybe more basic than we had hoped, it is functional and useful to our primary user.

CSS update

rwestworth — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:54:42 +0000

After not having much success on changing styles in CSS I have been on the website www.w3schools.com which has been very useful for explaining how to change certain parts of the code. So I have now managed to change the colour of links when you hover over them, change the colour of the menu boarder and change the appearance of the headers. I am going to do some more research online to see if I can attempt to change the alignment of the text and put some colours on the page.

Css

rwestworth — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:16:56 +0000

In our session on Friday we spent the day re-styling our webite and adding some features. I have been trying to use Andy Budd’s book CSS Mastery to get some ideas, however I do not quite feel confident yet in attempting this on my own! I really want to attempt some of the things in this book, for example using background to effect and making links stand out, however at the moment I still feel that I need assistance to do this! We did however, successfully manage to upload some photos (which we bought from istock photo) and more content on to the website as well as create links to different pages of the site and other website. We found out that we are unable to create a discussion board with wordpress so we have decided to change that page to one called social networking. On here we have decided to provide links to exisiting social networks as well as setting up our own one on ning and linking it to this. I have created this today and it can be found at www.librarystore.ning.com On there I have started a couple of discussions and hope that this will be a good place for students to meet and chat as well as share any photos or events.

I think we have a good basic website so far with all the core elements on there that we wanted. However, I am very aware that we need to do lot a of styling to the site so that it is attractive and not just functional! I am pleased though with what we have done, espeically embedding a video on to our site.

Uploading content

rwestworth — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:54:35 +0000

Tim and I have been writing and uploading content on to our website this week. At the moment we have just put everything we have written on to our pages and will start to edit and design the layout this week. I have been doing some research on text layout and have been looking at the site www.webwizguide.com. It supports the writing of Krug by suggesting that you should not overload your website, and subsequently your user, with masses of information. Instead you should use ‘short paragraphs, small chunks of text, or bullet points, as most web users tend to scan a web page for the information they are after rather than read each line of text’. I think this is very important to consider for our primary and even some of our secondary pages. All we want to do is tell the user what the website or page is going to offer without bombarding them with information. Tim and I have been writing short introductions for each page which will hopefully do this; the user can then click on the relevant links they actually want to get the right information. I have also been looking at the site the $300 million button which states how too many instructions and buttons can be frustrating for the user and cost a company business. Although we are not trying to make any money from our site we do not want our users getting frustrated with too many instructions and buttons so I would like to take this into consideration and make sure our journeys are easy for the user.

webwizguide.com has also provided some other very helpful advice on design such as font size, advising not to write in too large a font or in capitals and to make sure there is the right amount of contrast so that it is easy to read. This is something we will defiantely consider when desgining our site on Friday. I am looking forward to thinking about all of these considerations and making a site which is inviting to the user and accessible to all.

Designing the site cont.

rwestworth — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:37:46 +0000

After thinking about content and our web page layouts I have been doing some research on graphic design looking at complimentary colours and thinking about using colours that our accessible to all users. Using the colour wheel and colour theory I have been considering the effects of using complimentary colours compared with monocratic colours and feel that these would perhaps be more effective and easier to see for our users. I have also been looking at the site www.sessions.edu which explains how different colours can produce different moods and reactions. For example it states that red is an ‘aggressive, strong & heavy’ colour. This is certainly not the reaction we want to evoke in our users. However, the colour orange for example seems to evoke a more positive response of ‘warmth, excitement & energy’. This is something I will definitely consider when we come to choose our colour design. The website also warns that if choosing a complimentary colour scheme to keep the contrast low as ‘too much contrast makes your work difficult to digest’. I want to keep our site warm and inviting as well as bringing out an energetic vibe for our student users. We might want to consider then using orange with blue as the compliment each other well on the colour chart and the colour blue is also a comforting and secure colour. These emotions would also hopefully compliment each other, to not only produce the right look but the right message to the user.

Designing the site

rwestworth — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:23:48 +0000

I am very pleased as we have had a very good response to our questionnaires from different universities across the UK. We have been able to put these results into a document so that we can compare them and look for patterns. One of the most obvious patterns is that many of our participants are already part of an online social network so we feel that this is perhaps a less important priority for us to focus on and what we really need to focus on is the online resources which all of our questionnaires reported would be useful. We are now attempting to wireframe our site and decide the most important elements required.

I have been reading Steve Krug’s book ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ which is really useful when trying to plan the content of our site, for example on the most important things the book stresses is that users will not take a lot of time on website, they want to find their information quickly, without working hard! He writes: ‘people tend to spend very little time reading most web pages. Instead we scan…them looking for words of phrases that catch our eye’ (p.22). I think this is really important for us to follow; as a small group we will have to restrict ourselves with the scope of the site and will not be able to upload a great amount of information, what we do put on the site needs to be eye catching, relevant and useful to our user.

We are hoping to have these designs finsihed by the end of the week so that we can start buiding the site. I am optimisitic that although we do not yet know everything that will go on our site or if it all will work, we do know the core elements that we want on there and these have been seen as beneficial to potential users.

Week 5

rwestworth — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:17:41 +0000

Our group is now down to just 2 so we have had to do a lot of re-assessing so that our project is not too big to manage. I have been reading the book ‘Getting Real’ from 37 signals which offer a lot of information and guidance on how to disregard components that are not essential as they waste time and can confuse the user. With just two people I think it is best that we concentrate on what is really essential for our site so that we can do them well. We have been working on our personas and scenarios this week which also helps to highlight what is really essential for our site. We have decided to now focus more on the online resource side of the site so have geared our scenarios around this, however we do still feel that interaction is important so are trying to incorporate this with the resource side with a discussion board.

Although this site will be simpler than we initially planned I am optimistic that what we do manage to achieve will be useful and essential to our users.

Week 4

rwestworth — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:00:02 +0000

Work update:

I have received 7 completed questionnaires so far from students from other universities which I am really pleased about. I was not expecting a response at all so to even get half a dozen replies is promising, i’m hoping I may receive a few more within the next couple of days. We will also, hopefully, be gaining more completed questionnaires from our course group on Friday.

I have just finished typing up my competitor review for librarians.ning.com. I have actually found this a really useful task to do as not only has it given me ideas for our website, for example having links to videos on youtube etc of people discussing issues current today in libraries, but it has also shown me the limitations of this site, for example not having a useful links page to direct users to website such as CILIP, something I see as essential for our website. I am looking forward to meeting with my group tomorrow so that we can gather our competitor reviews together and analyse the completed questionnaires. Although I feel that we have also had a good idea of what we want our website to be, I am hoping that we will have much more direction tomorrow.

We have started to use google docs to share our work and information, i’m finding this a really useful way to keep on track of what everyone is doing and the tasks yet to be done!

Questionnaires

rwestworth — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:00:58 +0000

Seems like I am having some luck with my questionnaires, after sending them to various universities across the UK I have had a few responses from course tutors telling me they have passed on the questionnaires to students and since then about 4 have come back from students. This is really positive and I am hoping I will have a few more by Friday so that my group can analyse them.
I have also put a post on a facebook group for librarians asking if anyone would be interested in having an input for the website by sharing their experiences. I am not expecting a huge response to this but even a couple of contacts with qualified librarians would be greatly beneficial.