START - Website

I've been given this delightful project via Avril Butler, START stands for Students and Refugees Together, their a charity started by Avril which works with many Social Work students (hence my involvement) .

After my first meeting with them it's become apparent that this is going to be a fun project. Particularly that I'm not to restrained with technologies i.e. not tied down to SharePoint (not that there's anything wrong with SharePoint). But it does mean I get to do some coding etc. The Aim's of this project are to freshen up their current website:



And make it more Web2.0 well intially they indicated they wanted it to look nice and have areas to update. I felt that having some structured formal areas i.e. about us, history etc which arn't going to change to keep them straight html i.e. I'll make them and they'll stay that way but have image galleries, and blogs which are driven by themselves.

Which this is where the exciting bits come in, the photo galleries, shall be driven by flikr, and the blogs by blogger and obviously have a twitter feed etc. It should be a true mash up!

Annoyingly they currently have some lame hosting with Mr Site, which is shocking and very restricting so I'm hopeing we can change this or use their own servers. So whilst I wait for this to be finalised I've been researching how to import all these 2.0 technologies into one page:

Twitter was quite easy.
Blogger is a little bit more complicated and requires me to use something called MagpieRss, which essentially embeds the RSS feeds from your blog into a html page.
Picassa (googles version of Flickr), requires you to install Googles API to access full functionality, however it does enable it to be hugely flexible and will hopefully result in seamless transitions between site and Picassa.

The majority of the software and technologies I'm going to be using on this project will be based around OpenSource or Free Software, and I'm hoping to maintain Creative Commons throughout this project which fits with my own views and hopefully suits the fact that I'm working with a Charity.

Clinical Skills Online Resource - Update

Right well I've finished transfering the old resource onto SharePoint, now comes the interesting part of seeing what a Web2.0(ish) interface of SharePoint can do to the current quite static resource.

Some initial ideas are (not just restricted to Web2.0):

• Discussion boards for users to talk about certain procedures hints and tips.
• Integrate the Diary/Calendars for each clinical skills area into the SharePoint pages, so people can quickly look on-line to see if the rooms are being used.
• Collaboration between all staff involved in the Clinical skills laps to be able to update alter add to the resource as it goes along.
• Flash training packages, my predecessor created an interesting package training people how to empty a Catheter Bag this was part video part flash based and feel it worked very well. Would be good to add similar training packages to this resource.

That's all I can think of for now.

Clinical Skills Online Resource

Right well basically sprucing the old site up a little bit (0ld):


Going to go with my standard Tulip design:


Hopefully looking to incorporate the custom Calendars etc into this site overall so people can view what's going on in the Clinical skills and when etc. Should hopefully work quite well. Discussion boards and information booklets, overall to give the old version slightly more presence. This is to hopefully co-inside with the roll out of Share Point on the staff/student community sites, but in the mean time this site shall lay on a Tulip site and shall simply pack and go when the new system is rolled out. Shall as always give any updates on this project.

The live updated project can be viewed here: http://study.plymouth.ac.uk/module/heaa101e%20ayau%2008/online%20resource/default.aspx (uop login required)

Cool E-Learning possibility....

http://www.modernista.com/7/

Imagine this menu used to guide students through a research package and able to attach information to this side bar, as they go along etc. A similar package could link into a Wiki and allow groups of students to research together see where other people have gone make notes and add new links etc... although might be treading on Delicious's turf slightly?

Mentorship 2009 - Part 2

After a recent meeting it's become apparent that there will be a need for some form of Flash interactivity in the site to allow the video's and similar to integrate nicely with the pages, as the resource is designed around a journey I felt the navigation would have to be key to the project.

Luckily the Webbies have just been finalised so with a category dedicated to 'BEST NAVIGATION/STRUCTURE' I felt it fitting to indulge in some research. Two sites who's navigation really stood out for me were:

• NIke ACG - http://www.nike.com/nikeacg/#dispatch


• KeithySon - http://www.keithtyson.com/#/intro/

I really like the Nike's spider diagram style navigation.



I've tried to reflect this in my sites design, this is early days yet, but I'm quite happy with the results... obviously the menu is a little bit more interactive than just a load of blobs with lines on them!:


We shall see how it ends up, but I'm quite happy with it, hopefully the other people I'm involved with on this project will also be happy!