WWW posts page 44

Stearn’s Personas

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We developed three personas for the Stearn’s Farm website.  They are generic people representing the most likely visitors to the site, and will be used to make decisions in site creation.  The appearance of the site should target these personas.  Content prevalent to these personas should be emphasized, and content decisions should be made with them in mind.  In general, the site should target these personas, though it should still be usable by others.

Our three personas are:  Teachers, Parents, and History buffs.

Teachers

Local and area teachers from preschool to maybe 4th grade might be interested in the farm for field trips.  Education of children is probably the farm’s biggest draw.

Needs

  • cost
  • hours
  • map and directions
  • attractions/things to do
  • tour visit info, including:
    • materials available
    • if tour is guided
    • picnic tables
    • bus info
    • bathroom info
    • safety info

Parents

Local and area parents and grandparents searching for something to do with their kids or grandkids might be interested in the farm.  Parents from Parma will be the most interested.  Parents interested in green things or from the inner city might also be especially interested.  Females are probably the most likely to be visiting the site.

Needs

  • cost
  • hours, especially the best times to visit
  • map and directions
  • nearby attractions
  • parking information
  • attractions/things to do

History buffs

History buffs from Parma or those interested in farms might be interested in the farm and site.

Needs

  • history of the farm
  • historic sites in the area
  • other Parma history

Stearn’s Research: Food for historians

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We identified history buffs as one of the probable main visitors to the Stearn’s site.  We want to list local attractions on the site, so I am researching eateries that history buffs might be interested in.

Here is a list of Parma eateries.  I’m not sure if there are any historical places in that list, but I’m sure most of them would be places that a history buff would be happy to eat at.

Possible Restaurants

Unfortunately, it is very hard to find historic restaurants in Parma with a search engine, so that is the best I can do.

    Stearns Farm Meeting 1

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    We had our first meeting with our client contact for our Stearns Farm project.  She (Debbie) was very nice and the meeting went quite well.  We got a much better concept of what we will be doing with the site.  We also found that the site will be made completely new on whatever hosting we care to put it on:  It is not tied to being served from the Parma site as the old “site” was.  So the project looks like it will be interesting and fun, and we’ll be able to do a lot with it.  I think it will be a huge improvement for the farm’s web presence as well, and we should hopefully be able to increase both visits and donations to the farm.

    We determined for sure that it is a 501(c)3 non-profit.  I’ve worked on a number of non-profit websites (including Red-Cross of Greater Cleveland, Humane Society of Greater Akron, and OROC) well an intern at RPM International.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to use some of my experience from there to help this project.

    Full WordPress Blog

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    We set up the full version of WordPress (from wordpress.org) for learning how to work with it. Mine can be found here.  I’ve already had experience working with the full version of wordpress (I’ve used it for years on my own site), but I haven’t gotten too far working with the themes.  I’ve taken this opportunity to make a theme nearly from scratch.  I’ve used the Sandbox theme, deleting all CSS but leaving the html/php templates.  I’ve considered modifying those as well, as I don’t like everything about them and I may need to to get the site to work as desired.

    Anyway, I’ve created a semi-fluid centered layout there using absolute positioning within a div.  I’ve been wanting to do something like this to allow the navigation and other non-main content to be placed at the bottom of the page structurally but still where I want it for appearance.

    It works fairly nicely, though it still has some problems.  For instance, padding on any of the absolutely positioned boxes expands them and messes up the layout.  Any padding must be done on sub-elements.  Borders on any of the main blocks don’t work either, and can cause layout problems.  And since the side columns are absolutely positioned and take up no height, I need a min-height to ensure all of their content doesn’t float out of their box.  I hope to continue working on the theme to correct these problems, and may use something similar for my own website.

    I recently (re)read about elastic layouts.  I find the idea to be good for usability:  The whole site scales when the text size changes.  So I’ve considered changing the theme to work completely based on em’s for sizing, except I’d have to use a workaround for the full image header.  Strangely though it seems most newer browsers can scale any site almost as if they were already elastic:  With the aforementioned theme, IE 7, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4 scale the whole page, including the header image and pixel width sidebars, down or up just fine and even maintain line lengths through part of the scaling.  Currently the page is 100% width unless the browser goes wider than its max-width, so I’d try to keep that if going to em’s.

    The theme hasn’t been tested in IE 6 yet, since I don’t think I have a copy:  I may have to use a virtual version or another computer.  I imagine it will fail miserably there.  I haven’t yet delved into the conditional stylesheets, but I may add one just for IE 6 if the site doesn’t work well with it.

    I can’t figure out how to apply this theme to this wordpress.com blog.  It seems like it may cost money to do.  I’ll have to investigate further.  I may end up moving this blog for the class over there, maybe converting this into a personal blog.

    Questions to ask the client

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    In this class, we will be working on updating the site for a historical farm in the area.  We are coming up with questions to ask them about the site we will build for them. We must use these questions to find out their needs effectively. To do se we need to be good communicators.

    Questions should uncover:

    • Target Audience
    • Style
      • Examples: Get examples of 3 sites they like or would be what they are going for
      • Branding: logo, colors, etc that the organization uses to identify itself
    • Content
      • Priorities for content, functionality
      • Objectives
      • who will provide writing, images
    • Technology and hosting
      • Cost
      • Database
      • Scripting
      • other features
    • Target audience
    • Dollars
    • Timeline
    • Peers & Competition

    Historic Sites

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    I am taking a look at some historic sites and deciding what I like and dislike about them.  The sites are:

    Hale Farm

    Hale Farm and Village was the first historic place I thought of.  I’ve been there before and it is fairly nearby where I live.

    The site is a sub-site of the Western Reserve Historical Society.  This makes it more easy to find other historical places in the area, but gives Hale Farm less emphasis.  Some of the content bleeds together.  I think it could have a lot more information about what is at the farm.  The site is kept very up to date.  It has a fair amount of event and news related content.  There is an online donation function, though it doesn’t seem as extensive as many other non-profits:  I’m not sure if this is because they are less dependent on donations or get enough from other methods or what.  There is perhaps what is going to become on online store, but it is not functional currently:  It has a shopping cart, but no way to add anything to it.

    Peninsula Historic Museum

    A single page on the Peninsula Library site discusses the museum.  The museum is relatively small and new, so I suppose this is to be expected.  A basic description, location, hours, and basic exhibit descriptions are all the content.  I like that there are descriptions of the exhibits, though there could certainly be a more in-depth description of the museum itself, including perhaps a history.  A link on the page goes to another site where you can view some of the museums images, but the link only goes to the root URL of that site, and it tells you to search for the images:  it would be nice if they could have a link to their stuff straight off.  It’d also be nice if they actually seemed to have images there.

    There is no dynamic content on this page, though the main site has a lot more happening, such as events, donations, and a good bit of information about the other stuff the library does (including all that book stuff).  The menu is somewhat annoying to use.  It has a top level set of items that don’t go anywhere, but open up a set of other links to click.  The links aren’t actual links, probably flash buttons, so they give no tells of the underlying URL or whether they are to an external site.

    Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad

    This site is not a sub-site of others, giving the item of interest a lot of emphasis.  There are advanced data driven features such as event listings, news, a calendar, and even a membership section.  Some of the stuff that is nested in sub-sections of the site can be hard to find perhaps, especially with no search available.

    Hello there

    I am Toby Mackenzie, a student at Tri-C in northeast Ohio.  I am taking class called Web Design II there, for which this blog will be used.

    hosts file to access local servers

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    Ever since I had to change to a Speedstream router instead of my old 2wire (constant and still somewhat present connectivity difficulties), I had been unable to login in to my WordPress install locally. This was because the Speedstream redirected traffic calling the external URL or IP from inside to itself rather than forwarding the request to the server, and because WordPress requires a single fixed URL reference in its database that it automatically redirects to.

    I worked hard trying to get the router itself to not do this, but instead the problem was fixable on my computer itself: the hosts file, as I found on this post. You simply edit the hosts file:
    $ sudo vi /etc/hosts
    and then place an entry like “accessURL externalURL” for another machine, ie:
    tobysServer.local cosmicosmo.ath.cx
    or modify a localhost line for a local machine (haven’t tried this yet):
    127.0.0.1 localhost
    becomes:
    127.0.0.1 localhost cosmicosmo.ath.cx
    Or possibly you could just do as for another machine and access by the LAN address rather than localhost (haven’t tried this either, just speculation).

    This was very quick and easy to do and works like a charm. I haven’t seen what happens if my WAN network access goes down with this method: I imagine it would cause problems accessing any part of the site.

    One problem I’ve already found with WordPress and this method is that many links don’t work because they contain the full URL. Examples include the Preview button and the all post links. You must copy the link and past it, replacing the hostname bit. But all the admin links work, at least the ones I’ve tried. Tag autocompletion doesn’t seem to be working either, but I’m not sure if that is a browser compatibility problem with this new 2.7 version or a plugin (simple tags) conflict.

    WordPress and SVN

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    I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but I finally decided to use subversion to update my wordpress instead of the download, copy over to server, copy in all old files method. Details on using SVN with wordpress can be found on WordPress.org.

    Since it was my first time, I had to do an initial install so that all the subversion tracking data would be there. The command for installation, which would be used for a new install, was just a simple one line thing with the url of the install and a few flags. Then I had to copy over my htaccess, wp-config, and wp-content, all simple and easy.

    Because this brought me up to date, I was unable to try the update type commands. But it seems extremely easy, just a one line command again, plus the web based upgrade script.

    This should make my upgrading much faster and easier, and so lessen the delay between upgrades.

    [Update 09/01/10]The steps, which I should have included before:
    $ cd blogpath
    # for trunk versions you can simply update
    $ svn up
    # OR for full point revisions, you must use the switch command to change versions
    $ svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7/ .
    [browser]updgrade.php

    [/update]

    [Update 2/13]I’ve now done an update via subversion. It was in fact extremely easy, just one simple command line command followed by the upgrade.php script. Everything works fine, no copying and moving files and what not, although a backup is a good idea.[/update]

    emac died; back to the old server

    On Friday, the eMac being used as my server suddenly died. It was running fine at maybe 1400, and I had remotely accessed the drive around then. But I noticed the fan noise was strangely missing at maybe 1800. The power button did nothing at all. Reading online, it seemed a dead PRAM battery could cause some all-in-one macs of that era to not boot. So I bought a new battery from radio shack on Saturday. It ran a ridiculous $15 for a 1/2 AA Lithium battery, but I figured it was worth a try to get the server up again. Unfortunately, after putting it in and resetting the power management unit several times, the best I got was the fan to get power for less then a second before shutting off. After some more reading, I found the power supply board is probably bad. On those computers, the power supply is built into a special board for only those computers that contains the graphics and audio stuff as well. So it’s probably not worth it to get a new board for the thing to fix it.

    I bought myself an external drive enclosure for 3.5″ disks (I already had one for 2.5″) to get the data from the eMac. I had backed up nearly a month before, and had made several important changes since then, so I wanted the data before I got the server up again. The drive was quite a pain to get to. I had to dissassemble much of the emac to get to the drive. Everything in there is very tightly packed together and crazy, very proprietary looking parts for much of it. When I took out the drive, I was a little worried. It had been a while since I had worked with anything but 2.5″ drives. The thing looked so big compared to them that I was worried it might be and old 5.25″. But of course those went by the wayside long before this computer was made. The enclosure I got (an acomdata) works nicely and is very speedy. It’s also quiet, with no fan, but still doesn’t get hot it seems. It cost more than others, but it got very good reviews, much better than the only other one that I could find locally.

    So i got the old data and put it back on my iBook, the computer I use most of the time. I had set up a server for testing stuff on it, so I just copied the old site folders and the important mysql files and got it up fairly easily. The new server has MySQL 5, so it is a little more up to date. It still only has Apache 1 though.

    Whenever I get my new computer, which will hopefully be in June, when Mac OS 10.5 is released, the iBook will become the server full time. So it worked out alright really. Except that I’m not sure what to do with the dead eMac. It is currently disassembled in my living room. I don’t really know how to sell it, nor to fix it.