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Copyright, Portability and other nontechnical web site issues

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-03-09 12:56:32 - Graham Ellis

Sometimes, I get so enmeshed in the technical that it's good to take a step back and look at our web site (and web sites in general) and say "what do we need to consider in the broader picture". I had this opportunity yesterday evening, as I ran a short session to look at some PHP issues.

A couple of broader questions ... for you to consider about your site ...

What do we need to consider as well as the code?

Copyright Do we have a copyright statement? Do we own copyright on all the images and any text we have copied and pasted on to the site? Do we have permission from the people who we show or quote to show or quote them?

Browser Portability We've developed the site on Internet Explorer. Does it work on Firefox and other browsers too? How does it look on a reduced size screen? Does it print nicely - and does it print nicely on both European and American paper sizes?

Security Is it open to injection attacks? Can submissions of inappropriate material be easily made to the site? Do we have any data files which have accidentally been given URLs?

Findability How easy are we to find through the search engines? Do we have URLs which will make our pages stand out? Are we found on the correct terms? When people arrive at our site, do they arrive at an appropriate page? Do our URLs remain unaltered so that search engines will continue to send people to pages that continue to exist?

Maintainability If When something has to be changed, how easy will it be? Can we add an extra box onto a form, an extra page into a navigable set, an extra validation check into a user entry and have that change be consistently applied once it's been written and tested a single time? Can we avoid ending up with a mish-mash of different fonts, colours and look-and-feels?

Usability Do people find what they want on our web site? And if they do, is it in a form that they can make the use of it that they want?

Disability Discrimination Is our site accessible to those with various disabilities - people who require larger text, people who are colour blind (that's 8% of males in this country), people who are dyslexic, and people who require the text to be provided in shorter blocks?

Who is [this] web site for?

That's a big question ... which I've answered with regard to our web site.

Prospective Delegates ... Start at our public course schedule or at details of private courses at our centre or at your office

Current Delegates ... will find all the examples on their course under the course schedule [example] Perl Programming, and updated notes indexed on The Horse's Mouth.

Past Delegates ... will find the source code of all the training course examples, plus technical articles, sorted training module by training module. There's a full module index for you to start from.

Hotel Guests ... are catered for by our Well House Manor web site, which has appropriate links back and forth.

Technical questioners ... should land on the subject that's of interest to them - for example Using MySQL databases from PHP. There's also a technical subject index available.

Staff ... have a common page here which contains all the critical information we need to access rapidly; if you visit the page, though, you'll only see limited information whereas we see the status of the hotel rooms, who is signed in on duty, notes back and forth between the staff, and an indicator as to what our front door greeting screen is saying.

Friends and family ... can keep updated via The Horse's Mouth where a proportion of articles will be "newsy" rather than technical and ...

Community Interest Where individual interests / groups with which we are concerned can start. We have Melksham Chamber of Commerce diary and news, we have the First Great Western Coffeeshop, and we we have the obscure like the Larkhill Military Railway at Druid's Lodge and Ratfyn Junction.