Tangent Knowledge
Project Overview
Rick Farrell, president of Tangent Knowledge came to us with a completed website. All he needed was someone to maintain it, and perform weekly updates, additions, and modifications. Whenever I work on a website I didn’t personally build its always interesting.
In this particular case we encountered a few challenges that had to be overcome from the the initial design:
- Table based layout
- Very minimal use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Absolutely NO analytic software in place
- No graphic project files were included - only the flattened .gifs
- Javascript is relied upon heavily for the Navigation Menu - (I prefer CSS Based Navigation)
- There is no template and/or PHP includes to work with
I will say that graphically it is pleasing enough to the eye not to warrant a complete redesign, so that was good for us and cost effective for the client.
Proposed Solution
In this particular case there wasn’t necessarily a solution to propose. We were adding to a completed project. The assets to be added were completely up to the client, and include:
- Add previously written articles to his site
- Modify the navigation menus to reflect new areas of his site
- Add audio interviews which he would provide in .MP3 format
- Add video which is to be provided in .WMV format
In this particular case, a little experience on our end can go a long way. To the non-web developer these tasks seem easy - all you do is add pages, add navigation menu items, add audio, add video. To a web developer some immediate concerns come to mind.
What format will these articles come in?
Rick provided these articles in the file format that they were written in. MS Word. Well this seems easy enough, but converting static text in MS Word to HTML can take a while - especially if the articles are in some cases a dozen pages long, consist of headers, paragraphs, unordered lists, ordered lists, and particular font types. Solution: View the files in Firefox, view source, do some pretty extensive editing of the generated HTML, save to web page, preview and upload. In a project that pays hourly this efficiency was greatly appreciated by the customer.
How is the current navigation menu set up? Is it fixed width? Is it graphics based or text?
Unfortunately, the current navigation menu is javascript driven, variable width set to stretch to 100% of container, and graphics based (with no project files at our disposal).
Instead of redoing the menu in CSS (at least so far), we decided to work with the existing markup. Letting the client know of the limitations of this was important as it helped him realize that a redesign of the navigation menu may be necessary depending on the clients needs. As far as the menu being graphics based - we had to redesign the menu items in Fireworks to allow for flexibility in the design.
Audio & Video Integration
Audio and video integration can provide a bit of a challenge because not all computers can play the same types of files. The file types given to us were .mp3 and .wmv. MP3 is pretty standard, and Windows Movie files are not quite so. I rarely think highly of using Adobe Flash, but in this case it provided the perfect solution: Develop a single video player that would play both audio and video. To standardize the player, and to prevent possible glitches in the development stages I converted the audio and video files to Flash Video format - .flv.
The Finished Product
In this case the project isn’t quite yet finished. Rick was happy with what we’ve done and has decided to continue updating his website to further reach out to his customers.