Kylea had to get the last say...

...she just couldn't resist!

We're FINISHED!!!

Website Woe's

Ok well where do I start. . . Coding the website was easy. XHTML is just so good to work in. That was about the end of my good luck. After a lengthly battle with the Museum's IT guy over organising the hosting for the website on Friday afternoon we finally managed to get that under control.

Then it came time to start working on the CMS. No doubt if you've been following our story you will know that we chose to use wordpress, which yes I am aware it is a blogging tool really, but we decided to go ahead with it anyway due to the small number of templates required.

After adding the templates which I will admit was not hard at all the problems began. My first "neat" encounter with wordpress was on Saturday night when trying to login to wordpress it started telling me there were errors within the files. So after reinstalling wordpress with it's famous 5 minute install I was ready to go again. Fortunately I was smart enough to save my config files and php files to my computer first. Anyway upon re-install I was away again. After creating all the landing pages, and having to make all sorts of changes to simplify things for wordpress I thought I was definitely on my way. Bearing in mind this was sunday morning at this stage.

The problems I encountered with wordpress were huge really. So because every section has a different colour associated with it there was a lot of work to get into. Also because of all the pods on the landing pages I had to create a lot of custom fields to hold all the information. The problem with this I felt was that this was far too hard for the client to alter.

The next problem I ran into was creating detail pages. Possibly there was a fault on my behalf with the HTML but I'm not 100% sure on that one. Anyway at 4am this morning (monday) Wordpress spit the dummy well and truly and it was decision time.

I was faced with two options. 1) I carry on with wordpress, possibly having to start again due to the issues I was facing with parent and child pages. Ending up with a site that I wasn't going to be overly happy with due to the rushed coding, and finding that it would be very difficult for the client to edit.

or

2) Code out the entire site in HTML and post it in that form. Creating a site that looked like the designs and then spend some time after the challenge on either perfecting wordpress or experimenting with another CMS such as concrete5 or silverstripe(Yeah right I said I wanted easy to edit).

I made the decision that I would code the entire site in HTML and provide my client with a deliverable that looked exactly like they wanted and I could be their CMS seeing as I am more than happy to carry on lending my services to the Museum. I am quite happy with the end result and can now spend the next 2 weeks integrating the site into a CMS that will work for the client and allow them to easily maintain the website.

So we now have a finished site. which can of course be found at www.papakuramuseum.org.nz
(Kay will be adding in the content at a later date).

Wow what a hectic few weeks. But definitely worth while.

- Cam

Image Re-Sizing Manual

Here's the Image Re-Sizing Manual we made for the Papakura Museum, so take a look:


http://www.scribd.com/doc/18356074/Re-Sizing-Images?secret_password=1imysb22sjxqt7pss4p5


We made the manual to ensure that Kay & the other staff at the museum, felt confident in all aspects of editing their website, like being able to re-size the images to go on it :-)

Sweet Signatures

We made some e-mail signatures for everyone out at the museum today. This is what Kay's one looks like.

Logo Specs

We complied two sets of Logo Specs - one for the Papakura Museum and one for the PDHS, to ensure that each logo is used in the correct context and nothing is altered from the original design we have completed.


The following below is a link to take a look at the documents;

Papakura Museum Logo Specs
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18355836/PapakuraMuseumLogoSepcs?secret_password=1l3ttwdf9tfw3pfzvsv9

PDHS Logo Specs
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18355848/LogoSpecificationsGuidePDHS?secret_password=27386h78btxpj32hqqpw

Were done?!!

We've finished! YAY! Everything is complete...or just about :-)