Blog Has Moved!

Hey Everyone!

My Blog has moved. You can now follow both my photo and web design blog here:

http://arkudawebdesign.com/blog/

Thanks!

Campus Penguin Grading Rubic

Design – 4 points
The design has come out very good with what we are where going for. It is pleasing to the eye, its simple but yet complex and give a professional look.

Images – 3.5 points

We have some imagery on the site and what we have I think is good enough as users will be uploading their own photographs to showcase to others.

Layout – 3 points

I graded this on the lower end as the layout is good but depending on the content is what will make the final look on the inside pages.

Text – 4 points

The text we chose goes well with the site. It is modern and stylist and should be pleasing to our target audience.

Navigation – 4 points

Navigation is easy to find and always in the same location.

Mechanics – 4 points

Everything works great! PHP and MySql is what runs most of the site making it functional and running smooth.

HTML/XTML/CSS – 4 points

All the CSS and HTML is where it needs to be. There are not errors or breaks through the page and other pages inside the site.

Credibility – 4 points

The site looks very good. Unlike craigslist we find this site more credible and having an administrator regulate who is and is not approved will make the site a lot more secure.

Campus Penguin part 5

We have Campus Penguin almost complete and in it's Beta stage. I had my wife, Donique, test the site since she is a craigslist user and a student. Since out target audience are students, I thought this would be the best person to test this site. As I watched her use it, she seemed to be able to navigate and find where she needed to go. She did have a problem trying to figure out how to post at first but shortly after she figured it out. When she was finally done using the site, she said "Once the site is complete, I think it will be way better than craigslist. Just the look alone makes me want to use it. The only thing was that I did not have any instructions as a first time user on how to post. I also noticed that some of the posts where positioned funny and when I did a search the results had no links to them unless I pressed on the comments link."

Overall I found this testing very helpful. I think we will go ahead and add a help link for first time users and possibly send instruction for first time registered persons on how to use the site!

Campus Penguin Part 4

Questions have been aroused about what type of multimedia to be implemented into the site. One of the ideas that a team mate came up with is to ad a slider on the front page displaying various featured posts. Since our site is basically posting what you want to sell or finding work, a lot of interactive media is not really called for. Basic things such as optimizing images for the web and making a log in, have already been installed and basically ready to go. However, one thing did come to mind with a little help from a teacher, Sharon Kaitner. She mentioned something about a tutorial we had done in class about using jQuery to scroll to top. Here is an example of what I am talking about:

http://kgphojo.aisites.com/fall2010/intermediate_web_design/tutorial/

I think this would be a great addition especially if the website ends up being popular for students.

Graceful Degradation & Progressive Enhancement

So in Web land there are two things that will come up a lot. Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement. So what are they? When I was doing some research on HTML5 and CSS3 for the redesign of my site, I came across an article on Smashing Magazine. While reading this article, I came across these two terms and this is a very good explanation for these two terms:

"Graceful Degradation is a widely used term which ideology is basically using the latest technologies first, and then fix anything that needs fixing for older browsers. We do this on a daily basis: most of us code for Firefox first, then fix Internet Explorer. That is Graceful Degradation in the practice.

Progressive Enhancement refers to the habit of building first for the less capable, outdated browser and then enhance for the latest technologies. We, too, use this on a daily basis. For example, most of the times we code a website we start with the markup and then apply an external CSS file where we add all the styling. That is Progressive Enhancement in the practice."

source

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/08/04/designing-a-html-5-layout-from-scratch/