(Back to beginning of series)

Part 3: Site Architecture Design

Now that I had the majority of the HTML and CSS down, I had more to figure out about how to implement the various features (like image gallery, news,and mailing list). Should I write my own, or should I use existing tools? What language should I use? What database system? Which pages should be static, which dynamic? The process of building he site was all about efficiency: getting the most done, using the best tools, in the least amount of time. That would allow me to focus as much time as possible in my before my deadline towards the things that will make a difference: site design, usability, and the the use of the features on the site.

I came with the conclusion that I could, and should, develop most of the data management using external tools. Spending time re-inventing the wheel and rebuilding tools that already have dedicated teams would be wasteful, especially when they all had some sort of hook (mostly RSS feeds) that I could just pull into the site. I was familiar with all the 3rd party tools I needed, so I was already comfortable with using them and knew they had the features that I needed. I came up with:

• Google Apps for email and calendar
  • Here’s a good tutorial. It was a little messy at first, but it gives you an iframe (the only standards-breaking thing on the site… thanks, Goog) that you can just drop in.
• Picasa for photo gallery
  • I chose Picasa for a few reasons, the largest of which was the integration of the Google Apps account. While there’s no “Picasa” section of Google Apps, I could use the account I set up to minimize the logins I’m using, now that I’m using four tools. I used the RSS feed to export to the image gallery and to make an image gallery  RSS link on the home page.
• WordPress for dynamic pages and news
  • The reason I used WordPress, and I didn’t just slap together my own editor, was the WCM Page Feeder plugin. It allows you to serve individual WordPress pages as an RSS feed. This means that I could use WP’s superior news-serving tools along with their page editing tools with very simple integration. I also added an RSS link to the home page, for news.
• Pommo for mailing list management
  • I tried out a few tools, and found this to be the easiest to set up. Makes adding an email form pretty simple, manages everything for me. Another several hours saved to these guys. Here’s some credit

I also used a couple 3rd party PHP Libraries so that I could hook all of this lovliness together:

• Simplepie RSS Reader
  • Note: I had to switch my WordPress RSS feeds over to Atom, even though SP claims it can read the RSS 2.0 standard. This was a simple checkbox in the “Writing” section of the WordPress settings.
• phpmailer for mail functions
  • A little messy to set up to go through Google Apps mail. I had to set these settings in class.phpmailer.php in order to connect without errors. Once you have this part right, though, you’re good to go. I’ll go into more detail about this in the next article.

Once all of these tools were in place, it was a simple matter of dumping their content, using Simplepie, into my template. I’ll talk about the actual hooking up of everything, and setting up the custom code I did write, in the next article.

Part 2: Site UI Design / HTML Structure

When I first picked up the project, I had a few things to consider: what requirements do I have, and once I had those, how would I display these feature in a neat manner, and what technologies would I use to implement them. The requirements part came out pretty easily, after a couple of phone conversations:

• Calendar of events
• Photo Gallery
• News section
• A few generic pages
• Email mailing list
• Misc. vital information (times open, address, that sort of thing)

And now I needed to put together some kind of design. I had recently finished reading a few usability books, so I was feeling pretty good about putting some of these ideas to work. I knew that people coming to the website were probably going for directions, a phone number, or hours of operation, so I put high priority on these being visible and easy to use (such as a Google Maps link for the address). I also wanted to entice people to explore other areas, so I added some photos from the photo gallery towards the top of the page. Finally, I included elements from all the page- just little teasers- across the front page, such as a small calendar of events, news block, and a blurb and picture about their restaurant. Now, I had a home page with all the information a user needs, quickly and at the top, while encouraging visitors to browse a little and check out the gallery and other pages for even more information.

With this sketched out on paper, it was time to actually write out the HTML. I came up with a structure similar to my HTML5 Template (and in fact, it’s what I based my template off of.) I wanted to use the new semantic HTML5 elements and attributes, such as example text on textboxes:

<input type="text" name="Email" id="email" maxlength="60" placeholder="email@youraddress.com" />

I used the help of a jQuery Watermark plugin to help style the textboxes as well, since few browsers actually pay attention to the placeholder attribute yet. Further HTML5 inclusions were sections for the individual blocks of text, an aside for the side column, header, footer, and nav elements. Besides the HTML5, I also implemented a link tag for the news RSS feed:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.waterfordfamilybowl.com/wordpress/index.php/feed/" />

This allows browsers and whatever happens to crawl your site to say “hey, there’s an RSS feed here” and allow users to easily pick up the news RSS feed. You’ll notice it in FireFox, IE, and Chrome if you have an extension installed.

Here’s what I use. Feel free to copy it and do whatever you want, it’s GPL v2 licensed. (zip file)

• The Html5 Shiv (conditionally for IE, of course.)
• The CSS is Richard Clark’s HTML5 Reset Stylesheet, plus some stub styles like image / text replacement for the h1.
• Whatever jQuery UI 1.8 theme (if applicable.. most of my sites use jQuery UI, so I added it to my template.)
• Conditionally, an IE stylesheet. I go ahead and lump IE 6+ into one bucket. This could be broken out into several stylesheets (per IE version), but I’ve found that using the reset sheet generally limits the amount of IE fixes I have to do, so there’s not much wasted download time at all for IE users. If your stylesheet gets too heavy, break it out at your discretion.
• Several IE conditional statements to build IE wrapper divs to make styling easier. If you’re including styles by version, you probably don’t need this. Also has the added benefit of fast browser version checks with jQuery.
• Header with heading, subheading. The h1 is a link sometimes, using css image/text replacement. I went back and forth on whether the page title or the site title should be an h1- and chose an h1 based on arguments on this blog post.
• Seperate nav. I almost put it with header- but I like keeping the header more pure for the logo/title and subheading.
• A div to wrap all of the content, and then a “maincontent” div. I haven’t found better names yet, so here you go. They’re not section elements, like most of the content is in- the structure is there strictly for styling reasons.
• An example section. I like giving it an id with the page title, so I can add in page-specific styles as needed.
  • The section’s header, and content, as is reccomended
• An aside, styled as a right-hand column with subsections
• A footer, with links (probably the same as the main links), and copyright information. I’ve used an address element to wrap the webmaster’s email. Semantics!
• Finally, jQuery 1.4.2 and jQuery UI 1.8 pulled from offsite sources (parallelize downloads, plus it’s likely cached from another site)

So, the idea was to get about an hour or two’s work done by simply opening up a file. I think I’ve accomplished this- anything extra I can remove, I can switch the left and right columns pretty easily (or add a third, or fourth), and I have some very basic styles down (just change those grays to something a little more colorful.) Be free, my template!

Waterford Family Bowl website (www.waterfordfamilybowl.com)

A little while ago, my aunt approached me- she needed a website for her bowling alley. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s go over what you want and we’ll build something that works for you.”  In the back of my mind, I was thinking “awesome! Perfect timing to flex my HTML5 muscles and try jQuery 1.4 in a production environment; will it work?”

The site’s now completed, and in production. Go ahead and check it out at http://www.waterfordfamilybowl.com (still waiting on a little alternate content ). I’m going to, over a series of 4 or 5 posts, go over how the site works- how and why I used PHP, jQuery, HTML 5, jQuery, WordPress, Picasa, Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, and Google Apps; and, how I merged them all to create a dynamic, easy to use and easy to edit website. I used principles from books like “The Design of Everyday Things” and “Don’t Make Me Think”, and I’ll explain how and where these came into play.   The process I took made even IE 6 compatibility a breeze!

Brief overview on how I plan to break it down:

1. Intro to series
2. Design - architecturally and graphically
3. Implementation of WordPress, Picasa, etc.
4. “Contact Us”, finishing touches
5. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools overviews
6. Wrap-up (maybe?)

My awesome first tablet design

(This post was started using my new tablet!)

Well, I suppose that now that I have a tablet, I oughta start practicing. You see, I’ve never been one to have exceptional handwriting skills, so it’s a good thing that I now have a computer that can understand my handwriting better than my 8th-grade Spanish teacher could. I used to get a LOT of zeros on my homework.

(At this point, I’m back to my keyboard because my hand began cramping up. I tried, at least… Typing at 90WPM  on my keyboard is superior to writing using a plastic pen on a mat.)

I’ve long dreamed of owning a graphics tablet, for quick mockups (I included my first here. Creative Commons license, feel free to derive from its awesomeness.) I picked up the Wacom Pen & Touch. Three days in, it has been fun to play with; while it hasn’t been 100% everything that I ever imagined it would be, I think that it may be more of a learning curve issue rather than an issue with the technology itself. I’m used to using a mouse that I have to throw all over a mousepad, not a pen and a tablet that maps 1:1 with my monitor (originally, it mapped to both monitors before I turned off the second monitor in the tablet settings.)

One of the troubles I was having was that it seemed somewhat laggy when I was using my pen on Windows 7 with Photoshop CS3. I noticed mostly that when I was writing, I couldn’t add small details well (look at how crazy all of the lines in my As are); it would sort of stick and think it was supposed to pull up some kind of command menu. I’d like to blame it on myself, as a user error… but it isn’t at all obvious how I fix that issue, if it is one.

Regardless, I’m going to soldier on and try a few more mockups before passing more severe judgement. There are probably some hidden settings somewhere to fix; and once I have those figured out, I’ll post a follow-up on how I did it. Hopefully I do it. Don’t crush my dreams, Wacom.