Behold my new favorite design page!
You can’t get the total feel from it here, because I’ve just uploaded a screen shot and you obviously can’t interact with it, but this is the basic design of how the ‘Why’ Page will be laid out.
The images pull down to reveal information about the specific reason emigrants of that time were leaving,
Now that we have all of the pages, at least in initial forms, done, we can dive into the user testing head first!
So I’ve just finished creating a promo-website for our website
Maybe seems a bit redundant- but basically this is to promote what we are doing while emigrationisle.com says ‘coming soon’
We can also use this link to send on to potential interested parties so they can get a better feel of what it is that we are doing.
So the emails I sent out a bit ago are starting to get some response-
Lynda Callaghan (from the blog) loves what we’re doing and wants to get involved. She has suggested an emigrant, Steve Beatty, who she still has contact with that she thinks would be interested. We’ve sent her along a list of questions (a LONG list of questions) to see if she would mind speaking with him and getting the answers- and she said not at all! So now its just a waiting game there.
We also got some word back from a woman named Anne and a man named Michael, both who currently reside in Canada and moved around the 1980’s- sent along a short few questions to them and hope to hear back soon!
Check this out-
Irene has worked her butt off to create some ‘on click’ versions of our Why page- so when you click on each area of Australia, you get some detailed information about that specific part-
Here’s what she’s come up with,
Alright so here’s what we have worked up for the why page – Irene has done her best to convert as much of the info I’ve found into icons/graphics, hopefully it goes over well- I personally think it looks great!
Additionally- if you looke really close you may notice a difference in navigation. The bar we were using wasn’t ‘cross browser compatible’ so Irene and Colin have worked out a new one- so Irene has been working on a way to incorporate the stickybar at the bottom and merging over the left-space at the bottom with the ‘Main content’ area. All feedback appreciated!
New series starting on RTE1,
Did we pick a hot topic or what?
I know, I know-
The posts have been very text heavy-
But there’s been a lot of ‘text’ heavy stuff going on- however Irene is back and has mocked up a really nice When page for you to check out-
We’re back to using the ‘page flip’ idea and Irene’s found a helpful tutorial to go with this http://www.jpageflip.de/index_en.php and Colin is playing with this idea now.
I have hit a serious wall trying to find the next emigrant to move onto. The whole point of starting with the early emigrant is I figured it would be much easier to find the later emigrants, the more recent people. However, whereas in the past there are passenger lists, accounts, stories, etc. there aren’t that type of thing readily laying around for someone say, from the 1980’s (which is the era I was hoping to cover next). I hit a complete wall and actually recruited a few hands to see if they could find someone from the period, and no luck either. THEN – I remembered the Diaspora mini doc Irene found a while back and decided to try and email the creators and see if they had any bright ideas. Brenda, one of the creators of the doc, suggested getting in touch with the Irish Association of Toronto. So that’s exactly what I did, I sent an email to the group she knew of and then I looked up Irish associations in Canada and told them about our aim and goals and asked to see if they knew anyone that would be interested. So now I am diligently watching the email account, however I’m not holding my breath here. Lastly, I found an article from Generation Emigration about a woman named Lynda Callaghan. Lynda keeps a history type blog about the Irish in Leicester, England. I sent out a tweet to Lynda as my emails weren’t getting responses, and she replied!!! asking for more info. SO hopefully I can get her on board as well and then we have a UK emigrant as well. Fingers crossed everybody..
Check out her blog here- http://lynda-callaghan.blogspot.ie/
Charlie is away this week so it is really up to us to decide where to move from here for now. Colin has decided to look into the dynamic way of doing the site, and get his own opinion on the matter. So we’ve also been looking into making the site cross-browser compatible, checking if it works on different browers and cleaning up the code.
Colin did the testing on different browsers and we are good on most of them with the exception of IE7, which we’ve decided to just leave for the moment. As far as resolutions go, we are looking good on most resolutions bar anything with height 700 or lower. So 800 x 600 pics we dont look good on. BUT! we look good on iPads (YAY!!) and other tablets, so long as they have a higher resolution of 800*600 (which most of them do). So that’s good news all around.
Also, Irene found a program that makes png’s smaller in size without effecting the actual image. Its called PNGGauntlet. This may be useful for us, to load pages faster, which we noticed was a problem with our prototype and our screen splash and such that are holding the space on our emigrationisle.com as of now.
After looking into the dynamic vs. static chaos- Colin got Ajax mostly working. So the main content area loads (drum roll please) dynamically!
There are obviously a few more hurldes to cross to get it 100%, but it seems to be going strong and looks like what we are goign to stick with.
So- after not knowing what to do about dynamic vs. static pages- we decided to try and have a chat with Charlie and Hugh after the presentations-
Charlie raninto the other room before we had a chance to talk to him but Colin did get a second to talk to Hugh. Hugh said that to do the site dynacially would take a lot of time, and he doesnt believe we have enough time to do it that way. He also said that Charlie is probably going to be our supervisor, and that we should talk to him about it. This is where it gets frustrating. We’re not too sure which is best and we are hearing from one side one thing, and the other another. During the presentation we were told dynamic, but Hugh never said anything about opposing this. Hugh knew, in fact, thats why he told us to do it statically. He knew it would take time, maybe too much. The problem is, who to listen to and which of the two will get the final say in the matter. I think Hugh is trying to look out for us time wise, and Charlie is a domain expert and is looking out for quality. Hopefully we can do it dynamically and wow the both of them… It’s a tough one though.
Emigration Isle 