In the initial stages of this project my client mentioned the desire to have an interactive page that would provide the ability for users to keep track of the latest progress of Project Clay.
During the process this idea was partially dropped as the clients vision for this page was quite significantly out of sync with the project schedule, so i decided to provide a temporary solution.
Despite the client initally stating they didnt want a map, a map they have got! In the future i would suggest building a custom interface that pulls in technology from outside sources such as Googlemaps, Flickr and Wikipedia etc to create the application the client wants. The solution i have come up with at this time is to use a combination of Googlemaps and a site called Dopplr.
Dopplr is a web 2.0/social community site that you can log your past, present and future travel plans. It automatically encodes its RSS feed with GeoRSS data which rather handily can be interpreted by google maps to plot all your travel plans on a nicely embeddable google map.
So i have signed up to Dopplr, input details of countries involved in Project Clay as if i were travelling to them, exported that data to a custom google map and hey presto you have this page…
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I have used the full version of wordpress for the stories page in my client project and here is a quick update on how that process has developed…
To give you some background on this, my client wanted a page on the site where they could display the stories of Project Clay participants. They had found the experiences of participants thus far to be fascinating and a page that could be easily up-datable was required so they could aggregate all of the stories from all over the world.
Given the clients complete lack of knowledge of programming a content management system would be required for them to be able to easily update this page. So having expierience with WordPress.org as a blogging system i decided to adapt it and use it as a CMS in this instance.
So what ive basically ended up with is a page that on a normal wordpress installation would act as the blog page, but in this instance its just a collection of stories. In reality its not all that different from a blog page, with the main exception being all the stories will be displayed on one page rather than being archived like a normal blog.
If that doesnt make any sense let me provide some visual reference…
The client would simply log into wordpress and input the story into the admin panel above, a very simple system to use that requires NO programming knowledge at all, perfect!
Then as if by magic… we have a nicely updated page and the client can continue to add as many stories as it likes due to a handy bit of CSS that will repeat the background on each separate post and the page will continue to grow as stories are added. Long term some sort of categorisation would be necessary, this is something that the client could tie in with their desire for an interactive flash application of the projects progress but that’s another story for another post.
So there you have it, its a blog but its not a blog, it uses wordpress and it makes it all very easy for the client to update without getting stressed about code. Tremendous
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Evening all,
A quick post to provide some ingisht into how myself and my client have kept on top of the design process in this project.
I created this Flickr set http://www.flickr.com/photos/25565512@N02/sets/72157615777614011/
This allowed the client to keep a close eye on the designs i was producing and saved us both the hassle of having to email attachments and comments back and forth. They could simply look at this set and get back to me right away, wonderful!
Have a look at the set to see the evolution of the project, its come a long way since my last post. Another useful thing about collating all these mock ups in Flickr is the ability to look at how the designs are gradually developing all at once, you get a real picture of the whole design process aswell as being able to scrutinise each individual version…
So do check out the Set and let me know your thoughts, do you like where it has ended up?
More posts to follow soon…
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