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Nov 27, 2009, 7:18am

;) Nox13last Software and Games ;) :: Special :: Special Announcements :: Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition Write-up

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Topic: Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition Write-up (Read 41 times)

Nox13last
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Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition Write-up
« Thread Started on May 19, 2009, 11:18am »

[spoiler=Transcript of competition leaflet. Click to open.]Create a website
and win some
fabulous prizes.

To enter, simply create some web
pages with a theme relevant to your
school activities and you could
win some really great prizes including:

High-tech gadgets for you and your team;
High-spec computer equipment for your school;
A wide selection of CDs with games and educational software;
The Computing Challenge Silver Cup;
An invitation to the grand prize-giving at Cranfield University,
Shrivenham, on Wednesday 24th June 2009.

The competition is open to teams of primary and secondary pupils from all Oxfordshire schools. The judges will be looking for team working, imagination, design flair and innovative use of web technology. For full details and to sign up visit www.oxon.bcs.org/webcomp

Start now - your entries must be in by: Monday 27^th April 2009

Competition sponsored by:

Microsoft, RM, SOPHOS, Cranfield University, Wallingford Software, fox:fm, ICT (Information & Communications Technology), Oxfordshire Schools Web Competition 2009 (BCS) (www.oxon.bcs.org)[/spoiler]

Someone from the competition (Tim Lambertstock) contacted me through proxy of the person who gave me the information pertaining to the competition (Alex Double) and raised several concerns. In this topic, I intend to address them as they come.

Tim Lambertstock: Why did you choose this design? What tools did you use? Did you face any interesting challenges?
Nox13last: I chose this design because, at the time, blues and purples were toward my favourite colours, and one of my administrators provided me with an appropriate blue-black motif. By default, Proboards' (my site host) navigation bar only allows default icons. I had to find and inject a code into the website to allow me to add more icons. Those icons (Arcade, Download Center, Unity, and Rules) were constructed by myself using Microsoft Paint at first. Unfortunately, that only worked on the DEFAULT skin (colour and appearance scheme). Users of the other skins would see a horrible clash of the button's purple background and the navigation bar's actual colour. To work around this, I opened the buttons in 'Adobe Photoshop LE' and deleted the background colour of those buttons. That would allow them to be transparent, and inherently adapt to the website's colour scheme.
Tim Lambertstock: How did the team work together? What are the roles of each team member (e.g. artist, writer, photographer, technical expert).
Nox13last: I'm sort of the person who handles most of the technical workings of the website. I learned rudimentary control of HTML and Javascript from one of my administrators (Slash), and worked up using primers. My team mostly feed me ideas and suggestions to augment into the website. There are times when I need more practical assistance, at which point two other administrators more learned in the coding scheme than I am to go through the coding and work out bugs.
Tim Lambertstock: How does the site link in with your school or community activities?
Nox13last: A lot of my team members have to work with dyslexia. For this purpose, I have opened a small literary club on the website, which has already seen some improvement in their literacy skills. That is only a side-product of what the club's true scheme is. We organise a small 'Pen & Paper' RolePlaying group, which also assists in the more creative side of the members. Myself and my most active member have taken this up as a hobby, and it's having practical advancements for when he needs to improvise in his literacy work at school.
We also have an Art Communication centre, which allows members to upload their works from the art class as storage.
Tim Lambertstock: What have you done to make the site usable? How have you checked it's usability?
Nox13last: I've had several issues concerning this site's usability. As the site grows, it takes longer to load. Theoretically, in the most extreme cases, it could cause the user's browser to lock up or crash. We have been very careful in this issue, but there is a point where a little usability can be sacrificed for the betterment of the site. We've taken careful steps and asked many of our users how they grade the site in terms of function, feature, and usability. The average score we received back was satisfactory at first. As the site grew, it became harder to manage, and we had to reverse some of the 'sacrifice' of usability versus improvement. One site can't have all of the features. And we've learned that eating too much makes you fat and slow and prone to heart failure - the same goes for the Internet (mostly).
Tim Lambertstock: How did you test the site both from a technical and a user perspective?
Nox13last: As I said in the previous answer, we ask out users every now and then how they'd grade the site in aspects such as 'Aesthetic (Does it look nice?)', 'Speed (Does it load fast enough?)', 'Function (Can you do what you need through the site?)'
From a technical standpoint, I personally run an exhaustive regimen of debugging software on the site once every two months. I make sure that the site remains able to load under a certain threshold (seven seconds). With the outcome of the browser wars (Internet Explorer vs Mozilla Firefox vs Opera) looming ever closer, I've started making sure the site is cross-compatible, meaning that what may load in Internet Explorer MUST be able to load in Firefox and Opera too. I have no problems with checking whether or not the site is capable of intense traffic. One fear of web developers is a sudden influx of visitors clogging the system and crashing the server (known as the Slashdot Effect). I am more than confident that my host, Proboards, is ready for that, should it ever come.

Thank you for taking the time to read my replies.

« Last Edit: May 20, 2009, 7:52am by Nox13last »

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