Mansfield - Marketing Company

Being really tired on a sunday afternoon and mis-typing MSN into my browser caused me to happen upon this little website: http://www.mans.com/mansfield_f1.htm which is a 'technology marketing' agency. Normally when this happens I just re-navigate my way carefully back to MSN but this time the wrong website caught my eye. This may have been the monkey they put on the first page or it might have been the tab that says 'web development forum'. So off I went on a wonder. It was wat they had written in the 'Read Between the Code' section that caught my eye and thought I had to share.

To help you steer through the minefield of potentially costly miscommunications that characterize 'Web Integrator Speak' here's a quick glossary of terms and statements:
What your friendly web integrator really means when he/she says:

"Your site really needs a Flash Intro"

Translation: 'I'm dying to play with some cool multimedia software and would like you to pay for me to learn the software'

"We'll put a firm timeline in place"

Translation: In two weeks we'll generate a lengthy list of impressive milestones etched for posterity in M/S Project. We'll then ignore every element of the timeline and spend most of our time finding excuses why you the client are responsible for the overhang

"You know your target audiences"

Translation: 'We have no intention of learning who those people are. And if they don't live in a big city, wear hip clothes and go to impressive sounding networking events they're beneath our consideration anyway'

"Bandwidth is not an issue anymore"

Translation: 'If any of your site visitors have the audacity to use anything less than a T3 they are beyond our contempt'

"Can we meet to go over the project"

Translation: 'We need to hit you up for money. Geez, how were we to know that the six level rollover wouldn't work with Netscape 4.05?'

Google Crome - Gift

I came accross this fun little addition from from Google Chrome where you can wrap it up and send it to someone as a christmas present. I thought it was really nice as piece of software, it all moved smoothly and was really interactive, you could choose what paper to wrap it up in, a photo or video to go with it and send a personal message with it too. The little wrapping animation with it too was very nice to see.

Internet Explorer 8

Changed my mind about the new Internet Explorer 8 after about 10 minutes of downloading it, I think I was too busy enjoying all the news links that it had I didn't actually realise that it was so sssllllllllloooooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Bit of an anti climax really - nevermind.

Validation = done!!

I love that green box :D

Validation

I'm attempting to validate my website now, at the minute i'm on 13 errors and three warnings, not sure yet what to do but i'm sure i'll get it improved soon enough

Javascript Accesability Background

I have included a background colour change function in my website, this feature increases the interactivity of the website and makes it a bit more personal to the user. I also found that the black on white was a little harsh on the eyes at times, so choosing a different colour should eliminate this for the user.

My Waterstones Website

Game - Find the Worm

One of the Javascript exercises we did was to create a simple game. James and I have worked together on this. James is designing a website for a library so I thought it would be a great idea to make a game with a book film as we could then both use it in our websites.

We came up with the idea of Find the Worm, this is a game where a grid of closed books are displayed, when the user clicks on them to try to find the book worm that is eating the books. The books open up when clicked on.





I am really happy with the game as it is but I would love to develop it more by creating an alert that comes up when the worm is found, at the minute the user just carries on even when they have found the worm. It would also be great to have a counter too so that the user will find out how many turns it took for them to find the worm. That way they will keep playing to try to beat their prvious score.

Javascript

The brief says we must include three interactive javascript routines. We have been learning javascript for a few weeks now and I can use some of these in my website. These include the code to change the background colour, code to click through images (image Gallery) code to make text larger and code to include the user's name within some text.

I think one of the most important ones is the one that makes text larger if the user needs it to, this is one of the most commonly used accessibility functions. I have seen this on many websites and usually is at the top in the form of three A's (A A A). I will include this in my website as one of the Javascript routines.

Home Button Development

Here are three different designs for the Home Button, I am quite fond of the one on the left but for now I am going to use the text one in the middle. I may come back and change this at a later date.

Navigation bar

I thought about the roll over for the navigation buttons and have decided to not to include it at this stage as I am still unsure how to do it. Perhaps it is something I can go back to and include at a later stage.

Navigation Development

I have created different images to use for the different stages of the navigation roll over changes:

Website So Far

This week I have been able to develop my website a lot. I now have a working navigation bar and 5 pages in my website. I will try to give it a roll over image though to make it easier for the user to know that they are on the correct link before they click. At the moment there is not much content, just a brief description of what is on each floor of the building. I need to add images onto each page, I would like to add some Javascript that enlarges an image when selected, this would be a good piece of Javascript to use as accessibility for the user. I would also like to include the Javascript code that puts the user's name onto the welcome page of my site and I would like to have include the code that makes the text larger for the user but we'll have to see how the rest goes first.