a. Who is your target audience? What design choices did you choose to attract your audience to your site?
The target audience is my sister-in-law’s 7th grade math students and their parents. She teaches in a small school in Alabama. I chose this design to make it easy to read and used a color scheme that relates to the school colors.
b. What troubleshooting did you experience?
I had a few difficulties involved with putting the website together. One involved with the vertical navigation bar. I like having it on the side and all one size. It wasn’t until class last Wednesday that I got my question answered and everything fell into place. Up to then, there was a lot of frustration on that issue. I also had issues with getting the links all to appear as they needed to on each page. Trying to coordinate the link classes took a lot of trial and error.
c. How did the images you use contribute to your website’s purpose? Did your CSS style add to the “siteness” of your website?
The images used on the website all pertain to what you would see in a classroom or will see at the school such as the school logo and mascot, which I incorporated into the header/banner. The chalkboard with apple gives a well-balanced color scheme. By importing my banner graphic to kuler, I was able to find my font, background, and border colors. I wanted to add more graphics since I figured 13-14yr olds would be more interested to the content but I was at a loss so I added some comics to try to lighten things up.
d. What style choices did you make to improve the readability of your table?
The table on the math links page took some time trying to format. I wanted to provide both the name of the document and/or link along with description so there was a lot of content to deal with. Breaking it into groups with headers broke up the page somewhat.
e. How did the media you created contribute to the purpose of your website? What plug-ins does the end user need to display-play?
I incorporated a YouTube video that references the assignment the students are working on to help with homework and testing. The user will need to use a flash plug-in to run the YouTube video.
f. Describe your validating experience.
Validating was fairly simple since I consistently checked throughout the process. Most of the content is straightforward. I had a few typing errors which were easy enough to fix. My biggest problem was using a blockquote element on the lower half of the class rules page. For some odd reason, the page would not validate. After taking a few (several) hours trying everything I could think of to figure out what I was doing wrong, I finally gave up and reformatted as a definition list. Page validated… time to move on. All pages validated with the exception of math links page because of the embed/object tags.
g. How did integrating SEO best practice change or improve your website.
Because my audience is on a small/limited scale, for SEO practices, I focused mainly on referencing the content with homework links and school supporting documents for findability.
h. Discuss your BrowserLab experience. Will you continue using the browser labs?
When testing the pages on BrowserLab, I found only a small (perhaps 5px) difference comparing Chrome, IE 8.0, and Firefox 3.6 while using the “onion skin” view. Both IE and Chrome appeared to have a fuzzy effect although when testing the pages on my own browsers, only the colors appeared darker on IE and Chrome, nothing else. I will probably use BrowserLab just as another means verifying the testing process if I am on a computer with just one browser.
i. Discuss all testing requirements?
Testing:
1. Validate all code.
All pages validated with the exception of Math Links page because of the YouTube video.
2. Test functionality of all links
All links function, including pdf documents.
3. Run an accessibility test using one of the following resources
I used achecker.ca/checker/index.php for testing. The report returned with 2 known problems which were regarding missing ISO 639 codes (?). I checked with W3schools and found the codes the text reported. Reran the test and returned with no known problems, yay. I also had a couple of issues with the Wishlist & Funnies page which included a caption line that the checker said wasn’t needed so I changed it to a header 1 and because of the layout it didn’t need a summary line (?) which my guess is because of the alt tags already in place. I deleted the summary line and the page returned with no problems.
4. Useability overview – describe how you designed your site to enhance the user experience.
I tried to design the website to be extremely user friendly for both, kids and parents by limiting links to the content of the site. I have had my own experience with school websites trying to find information that the teacher has provided but is difficult to find with so many links to get to it. I tried to keep it very simple for the purpose of the site – to provide course assignments and help to students.
5. Test in Adobe Browser Lab (see answer from above)
a. List the three browsers you used
Firefox 3.6, IE 8.0, Chrome 7.0
b. What differences did you observe.
IE and Chrome appeared fuzzy and using the onion skin option showed that they both were a little off (like 5px) from Firefox.
c. What changes did you make to your web page after testing browser in browser labs? I found that there were no immediate issues to warrant changing the format of any of the pages of my website.
SEO: Discuss your strategy to promote your website. This could include: keywords, metatag, links, content and hierarchy.
As mentioned in section “g”, the website is for a small audience, so I concentrated more towards findability. My strategy was to use as many keywords as possible in the metatag that related to the website and with a clear informative description. I also considered descriptive titles and heading tags and tried to incorporate keywords… although, you can only use the word math so many times.
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