The Home Page

I want my home page to look nice and clean and clear and communicate what the site is all about. I plan to achieve this through ensuring that the site architecture and site maps are appropriate and well thought out before commencing any work on the site itself. These backbones of the site will ensure that the home page contains just the right amount of information to be of most use to the users who will visit it.
Badre says that "The home page should establish site identity and give a clear overview of the content. Both topic organization of the site and how to use the site should be communicated clearly by the links, buttons and tabs on the home page." (2002, p.161) To achieve this clarity of purpose on the home page it is essential that I get the architecture right so that I understand what it is I am building and make sure that all the content is there and arranged in such a way as to be easy to navigate, understand and for the visitor to get what they came for.

Reference:
Badre, A. 2002, Shaping Web Usability; Interaction Design in Context, Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA

Cookies in PHP

So, what are cookies? According to Ullman (2009, p.238) "Prior to the existence of cookies, traversing a Web site was a trip without a history." therefore "Cookies are a way for a server to store information about the user - on the user's machine - so that the server can remember the user over the course of the visit or through several visits." (Ullman 2009, p.238)

In my project I am planning to include cookies to make navigation of the website more user friendly and therefore have been doing a bit of reading about them and it appears that there are three important things to know about working with cookies.
1. How to set a cookie
2. Retrieve information from a cookie
3. Delete the cookie

And Ullman also tells us that "there are two more things that you ought to know about cookies. The first is how to debug cookie-related problems. ... The second is how a cookie is how a cookie is transmitted and received." (Ullman 2009, p.239)

Now I am off to read more about cookies and how I can put the code together from the examples in the book.

Reference:
Ullman L. 2009, Visual Quickstart Guide - PHP for the Web, 3edn, Peachpit Press, Berkeley, CA

And the reference...

The reference for the previous post is as follows:

Nierderst Robbins, J. 2007, Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets, and Web Graphics, O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol, CA

How to create liquid layouts in CSS

I have been using the text Learning Web Design to get a better grasp of what is required to build my website. I have been reading how to create liquid layouts which is the way I want to go. Nierderst Robbins (2007, p. 312) notes the advantages and disadvantages of liquid page design:

Advantages

1. You don't have to monitor for a specific monitor resolution.
2. You avoid potentially awkward empty space because the text fills the window.
3. Liquid pages keep with the spirit and nature of the medium.

Disadvantages

1. On large monitors, line lengths can get very long and uncomfortable to read.
2. They are less predictable . Elements may spread out or too cramped at extreme browser dimensions.

I think that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and have decieded to go with this option. Nierderst Robbins (2007, p.313) goes on to explain that you even if you use a fixed width for one column this is still considered liquid layout. She also talks about liquid layout using percentages and an example of this code follows:

div#main {
width: 70%;
margin=right: 5%;
float: left;
background: yellow;
}

div#extras {
width: 25%;
float: left;
background: orange;
}

This has helped me to understand how to position style in the sheet and apply it to my own web design.

Adding country in the prac

THis week's prac was quite different. We set up our databases and this is the first time I have done anything in MySQL which made for an interesting exercise. I managed to work my way through most of the prac however I did have a bit of trouble with the practical this week. I could add the country to the appearance of the website however it just wouldn't register any data I typed in. It was very frustrating! I didn't realise intially that you had to add the information into so many areas of the code and I think this is where I went wrong. I also tried shifting the 'country' variable around in the database to see if that made a difference... it didn't. In the end I couldn't get it to work however I have realised the power of php with a database and how you can just grab things like guestbooks etc. from the internet to use in whatever project you are doing (correctly referenced of course).

Following Hugh MCleod...

I have just signed up to follow Hugh McLeod's gapingvoid.com blog. He draws on the back of business cards; kind of strange but it works. The man is hilarious.
I hadn't realised that I could follow him through my own blog until I was looking over the features and functionality on here last week in class. Quite excited about who I can now 'follow'. I will be checking out Seth Godin next as I quite like his blog too.