2. PHP and MySql for dynamic web sites, by Larry Ullman, published by peachpit press in 2005 30/01/2008
3. www.tutorialized.com 23/01/2008
Goals
To create a working PHP 4 dynamic website
To use a MySQL database
To use error validation code where necessary
To make sure the site looks the same in IE 6, IE 7 and Firefox 2.0
Primary Target Audience
Gary is a 28 year old external college examiner; he has been doing this job five years and lives in the east of England. He has a wife called Alex and two dogs. He enjoys his job and likes reviewing students work. He has a keen eye for details and likes things that are well structured oppose to things that are designed well with images.
Gary has a passion for sport especially Football and Rugby and often goes to see his local football team play. He reads fiction books occasionally and gets a monthly subscription to GQ because he likes to keep up to date with fashion.
Gary would visit my site as part of his examination of my work. He would view my work in his office. In his office there is a 19inch flat panel monitor with a resolution of 1024x768, uses Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0, it has Windows Vista Ultimate as an operating system and has a 8MB broadband internet connection.
Secondary Target Audience
Emma is a 20 year old student on the first year of an HND in Interactive media course. She is really looking forward to the second year on the course and wants to know what she will be learning. She works part time at a nursery and enjoys socialising at weekends. She lives with her Mother and two older brothers.
Emma enjoys playing on her Playstation 3 and going out at weekends with some of her college friends. She reads mainly tutorial books on all things about web and print design. She gets a weekly glossy magazine and likes to read about celebrities.
Emma would visit my site to look through my work and see what she would be doing on the second year of the course. She has a laptop that has a 15inch widescreen, with screen resolution set at 1280 x 800, uses Internet Explorer 6 and has Windows XP as an operating system.
Tertiary Target Audience
Dale is a 39 year old warehouse manager for ASDA in the south of England. He has a steady job in warehouse but has ambitions to move the head office one day. He has no real internet experience and no interest in website design. He has ambitions of buying a new sports car and would like to see other people opinions on some.
Dale watches TV on a night and goes out for a meal with his wife of 15years every weekend. He enjoys golf and plays whenever he gets chance. He doesn’t read much outside work and prefers to rent movies.
Dale would visit my site to get real peoples opinions on the type of new car he is looking for. He would find my site through a search engine from his works computer which has a 17inch monitor, with a screen resolution set at 1024x768, uses Internet Explorer 6 and has Windows XP business edition as an operating system.
Delivery Requirements
Web hosting that supports MySQL databases
I will need a web hosting package that supports MySQL databases so I can store data on the server.
XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) 1.0 strict
This will allow me to build all the static elements of my website. I will be validating at strict level because it means my code will be the cleanest possible which should make my portfolio future proof.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) 2.1
This will be use this to give the XHTML a style. This seems to be the most up to date version that most browsers support and offers all the features I will need and accessibility.
PHP (Hypertext pre-processor) 4
I will use PHP to create the interactive parts of my website.
MySQL version 5.0.22
This version of MySQL is the one which my host server supports. I will use a database to work with PHP 4, this will mean I can create a section where all my feedback can be easily accessed rather than the feedback going to my email inbox.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
This is used to upload files onto the host server. I will use Dreamweavers FTP facility for this.
Competitive Analysis
Hempel Hotel Guestbook
This is an online Guestbook for a hotel in London called the Hempel Hotel. The page contains a header with links, a number of comments with hotel rating and a place to enter your comments at the bottom of the page Fig1.
The comments are all a little close together with no real clear space to differentiate between each of them. The line length is too long which makes each comment hard to read. The design of the page is quite bland compared to the header and it doesn’t have any visual consistency with the rest of the site, a black and purple header followed by shades of gray with blue text doesn’t make the page look interesting.
I am not sure each post needs the specific time an entry was posted. I think the data and year are very important but the actual time of day would not be necessary here.
The Guestbook entry at the bottom of the page looks professional; it is simple and not confusing I anyway. As soon as a user sees this outlined box it is obvious that they are supposed to enter their entry here. The sections are clearly marked with “Your Name”, “Your Rating” and “Comments” sections.
Overall the guestbook is a simple post and view type, which is all it has to be for this type of business. I would improve this by narrowing the line width of the text and defining each post more with more spacing.
Pura Vida Hotel Feedback Form
Pura Vida Hotel Guestbook
This is another Guestbook for the Pura Vida Hotel but is set up in a different way. With this site a user has access to the guestbook but has to go to a separate page to post a comment.
The two pages look completely different to one another. The Guestbook had a green, orange and light blue colour scheme, whereas the post a comment page has a red, yellow and pale green colour scheme. This type of change could easily confuse a user and they may think they have left the site.
The feedback page has a number of images laid over one another which doesn’t look professional. The colour scheme for this page does look quite tropical which I think they were going for but the text colour doesn’t suit the rest of the page. I think this page has been structured all wrong. The links are right at the top of the page and the logo is under the main image to the right of the feedback form.
The guestbook page has styled the comments with a green background and quite a think orange border. This matches nothing on the site and it doesn’t really suite a guestbook. The site only shows four comments per page, I think for this website this is a good thing because the comment they have received are quite long. I think if the comments were shorter this may be too little.
Overall this is a very confusing feedback form and guestbook. I would improve this site by restructuring the entire page and keeping the colour scheme consistent.
This is a car search website. I plan to create a miniature version of this website that only has 2 or 3 different cars of select manufacturers, such as Ferrari, Aston Martin and Porsche. This site is very clean and gives all its options a lot of room for the amount of options you can choose from.
The website has 5 banners that advertise external companies on this page. This is a lot for one page and they can be distracting, especially the one that is right next to the first set of options. Banners can create a lot of money for a company but I don’t think they should interfere with the actual contents of the site which is what is happening here. A small slip with the mouse would take a user to another website and they may not come back.
Excluding the banners I like the no nonsense approach this site has taken to show the user all the options they have. The page is well structured and easy to follow. I am not so sure the “check all” feature is necessary because surely if you click no boxes it will show you all the options anyway.
The location at the bottom of the page must be filled out, but there is no message telling you this so it is easy to overlook this and click search. This means you will get an error message instead of the results. This takes up a users time and if a user does not read the error message they may think the site is not working.
Overall I like this website, if it wasn’t for the banners I would like it even more but I’m sure they are getting paid a lot for the advertising. If I were to improve this site I would remove the advertising from the centre of the page and add a message to the location section.
See Fig 4, 5, 6 and 7 for Screen Designs, Site Structure and Assets List.
