New Portfolio Website

Check out my new portfolio website.

www.fclasing.com

Grading Rubric

Design - 4 points.
The design is visually appealing, the color scheme used represents our vision, and we have interactivity within the website. The content is useful for our target audience and I think users will feel identified with campus penguin.

Images - 3 points.
We don’t have many images but the ones in the home page which have been integrated in a flash slider which visually looks really good but not all the devices would see them.
The rest of the images are uploaded by the users.

Layout – 4 point.
The layout of our site is consistent through all the different links, information is easy to find. Titles, paragraphs and images are placed properly one uploaded and easily identified.

Text – 4 points.
Although we don’t have a lot of text and almost all will be uploaded by the users we placed it and gave it a certain color and size so once uploaded it is easy to read and has a proper visual hierarchy within the site.

Navigation – 4 points.
The site is well organized and easy to navigate making the information easy to find. The navigation is consistent throughout the entire site and pages have adequate titles.

Mechanics – 4 points.
Every thing works fine on the website and on the different browsers.

HTML/XTML/CSS – 4 points.
Although most of the CSS is in wordpress everything all the code is clean without misused tags and commented so it is easy to find and change specific elements.

Credibility – 4 points.
The site feels like a professional site, it is live and we are starting to make publicity towards it. It is ready for anyone to register and start using it!!!!!!!


www.campuspenguin.com

User-testing - Campus Penguin

For my User-testing I showed the prototype of Campus Penguin to my roommate and observed what things he would click on and the way he navigated through the site.
The thing that he interacted more with was the rotating slider on the home page. After that he started clicking on the categories we have but after that he started having problems with the navigation and finding the information because we had a problem with the design layout. We are working on fixing this little issues and once they are ready it will look very good and everything will work perfectly.

Scroll up Tutorial - Jquery

I made this scroll up in J query using a tutorial. I think it looks really great and its definitely something that we can add to our website because there are pats that may have a lot of information and its a very nice way to scroll up to the top.

Link:

http://fclasingr.aisites.com/jquery/

Weekly Update 11/23/10

For this week we worked on the Design documentation of Campus Penguin. We decided on one logo and on the color scheme we would be using. As far as the design goes we all agreed on one and we are starting to put everything together so we can have it working. Everything looks good so far and we haven't had any technical issues with the design.

Here is a part of the Design documentation:

Week Update 11/16/10

We have kept working really hard and now we can start to see how our website is going to look. So far we have almost all the design part done we just have to decide how we are going to place our logo and we are still missing a tag line which I think is very important because our title "Campus Penguin" although its good and I really like it, it does not describe what our website is about. The programing is also going really good and we will have everything ready so we can start imputing content and start working.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines.

The more frequently a website appears in the search result list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry specific vertical search engines. All this gives a website more web presence and an easier way for users to find it.

SEO is an Internet marketing strategy and it considers how search engines work and what people search for.

The leading search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search result. Some search engines operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click. Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the research results.

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross-linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility. Adding relevant keywords to a webpage’s Meta data, including the title tag and Meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site’s search listings. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently and give additional weight to your website.

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

SEO Method.

For this website we are going to use the technique or method considered as white hat. White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility.

Some techniques that we are going to consider:

• Include keywords is in the title of your Web page.

• Use keywords in headers. If your page has several sections, consider using header tags and include important keywords in them.

• Linking to all pages on a site via text links (or image links), which search engine spiders can follow.

• Using specific keyword rich page titles, headers, sub headers, internal linking, and page copy.

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Ensure that:

• Pages are indexed.

• Pages are well structured (with headers and sub headers etc.).

• Use descriptive page titles and other page text.