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Task: to design and maintain a web site to communicate with
accountants and the users of accounts throughout the course of a
research project.
When we decided to approach this research project in such a novel
way, as we were doing the project, it all seemed very easy. I mean
doesn't everyone set up a web site these days? You might be sure
it's a little more complicated than that and I thought it might
be interesting to make a note of some of the trials and tribulations
that we had had with the site along the way.
The very first site was written by myself, Ian Herbert, using Microsoft
FrontPage. This seemed very appealing as it had a number of templates
which meant you can get a site up and running fairly quickly. However,
it's really designed for either personal/hobby homepages or alternatively
a small business web site aimed at promoting three or more product
lines. I'm sure Microsoft would probably disagree with that and
it is probably fair to say that in the couple of years since we
started this project FrontPage has developed somewhat.
The early design soon ran into problems and using premade templates
became more trouble than it was worth. Another problem was that
the central media design team at the University of Derby said that
they would not support development using FrontPage - something to
do with the extensions that it used was not compatible with the
servers that were used at the University. It appears (and again
this may be a problem that has now gone away with time) many other
servers do not like using Microsoft FrontPage.
Now I don't know any of this technical stuff, I want Web authoring
software to be no more complex than using Microsoft PowerPoint,
Microsoft Word and the rest of it but I did follow the prescriptions
of the technical bods at Derby, which was to use Dreamweaver.
Now it would appear that Dreamweaver by Macromedia is a programme
of choice for professional Web designers and it seems infinitely
flexible, but I have to say a complete mystery to the uninitiated.
As funds were limited at the time I managed to cajole placement
student (who was working on a similar project) to do a little bit
of work on the role of finance web site. And where I say 'do a little
bit of work on it' I really mean to get us started from scratch.
Between the two of us we went out and bought a couple of books on
Dreamweaver and set about writing a site.
As the usual teaching commitments inevitably overtook my time enthusiasm,
it was left to the student, Anthony, to teach himself how to use
a programme and to start writing a site.
This was published on the University of Derby web site. And although
it didn't have a lot of content in did have an awful lot of pages
and this meant that we had to think very carefully about structure.
It seems very easy to write a single personal homepage but when
you go project that is rapidly growing in all sorts of directions,
then believe me it is extremely difficult to make your ideas into
a site that will be robust enough in its structure to allow for
further development - and allow you to keep the whole thing under
control as you go. See original design www.derby.ac.uk/research/rof
On moving to Loughborough University in October 2001, I needed to
transfer the site to Loughborough and found that the business School
there was based on Microsoft FrontPage, and thus the programme was
free, but there was little support available for Web authoring and
the central computer people - in this case Loughborough's audiovisual
services - only develop using Macromedia Dreamweaver. The catch
with this was that not only did I have to buy a copy of the programme
for my office PC (£160) but I had to pay on an hourly basis
for using the central services. It was decided that we should undertake
a major rewrite of the site using more elaborate templates, based
on the Loughborough corporate design and that we should restructure
the site as our initial attempt was getting unwieldy, and basically
was not conducive to further development.
At the time of writing in August 2002, I have come an awful long
way in understanding what web sites are really all about. It is
one thing using them as we all do on a day-to-day basis, but setting
out from scratch and developing them is as big a learning curve
as using a computer was initially. Many aspects of the process do
not seem intuitive and the advice that is available oscillates between
single page personal sites and huge creative corporate undertakings.
This seems to be one area of life that needs to champion the middleman!
Notwithstanding the problems above, I now feel that in getting
involved personally with the web authoring I am now at least in
control of the underlying design of the site and can control its
development - by being able to hold a sensible conversation with
the technical people! I know that last statement might sound a bit
control-freakish, after all why should an academic researcher need
to get involved in the nuts and bolts of web site design, but I
see so many examples of web sites that have clearly been left to
either the techies or creative multimedia designers and, somewhere
along the way, the basic style and message of the project has got
lost
.
In any case is perhaps not hard to forsee a situation when we will
all be publishing our work, lecture notes, research outputs etc,
on the Web.
If I hope these notes or useful. I have put some references at
the bottom of this page which give guidance on Web design. I would
like to say that I have not had the time or resources to follow
all their very useful advice but I'm rapidly finding that web site
design and maintenance isn't an exact science if you're not inexpert.
You have to use the experts and but be able to explain to them exactly
what you want, which is difficult when you only got some woolly
idea in your head about trying to make accountancy research exciting
and in Technicolor to boot!
There are a number of potential risks and some of these are:
Potential risks;
1. Not generating sufficient quantity, quality and diversity of
'traffic' to the site -
measures:
· production of a series of publicity statements in magazines
and journals, together with talks to specific interest groups, aimed
at generating interest and managing the diversity of interest groupings.
· hyperlinks from the ACCA site and other commercial supporters
with appropriate traffic, e.g. recruitment agencies, other institutes.
· More traditional questionnaires/mailshots to direct professional
people to the online questionnaire and discussion groups.
· Press releases commenting on the posting of interim findings
to the web site.
2. Infrastructure failures - Bandwith (no. of users accessing at
one time) and server breakdown.
Measures:
The site will be sited on a section of the Loughborough University
site which is consider reliable and robust enough for this exercise
- the University of Derby site could provide a 'mirror' server should
this be necessary.
3. Abuse of on-line discussion forum
Measure: intention to create an open Habermasion discourse in the
way that Shell's internet discussion board seeks to represent stakeholder
views. In the event of systematic abuse posting would have to be
controlled/censored through the team.
4. Failure to attract world-wide input
Measure: respondent email suffixes to be monitored as to country
of origin and direct publicity attention at those areas and, if
web access is a problem, pursue more conventional survey techniques.
Ian Herbert August 2002
Standard books for Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
Usability Engineering by Jacob Nielsen
Designing Web Usability by Jacob Nielsen
Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman
Human Computer Interaction by Dix et al
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