Sprint 6
Over the course of these last 2 weeks, I made a lot of progress. Firstly, I worked on inserting a blog within my website, which the band members can use to posts updates on band news. I researched how to implement blogs directly into HTML sites from scratch, but this was pretty complicated and I realized that I wouldn’t have the time to learn how to do it and make it work correctly in the necessary time frame. However, I got the idea online that I could simply embed a blog that I create on an online platform, such as Tumblr or Blogspot, into my website as an iframe. I first tried to set up a Tumblr account for the band, customizing all the settings so that it would look correct when embedded, but one of the members informed me that this was unacceptable because Tumblr was against the aesthetic of the band’s genre (Black Metal). He suggested Blogspot instead, so I went with that option. I tinkered around with the various settings and made it look the way I wanted it to, and then I embedded it into the News page of my site.
Next, I worked on setting up an online shop. I searched up online shopping services that I could register for which would allow me to embed purchasing buttons into my site, and I decided at first to use ShopSite.com. I signed up for an account and added the various items that the band is selling to this profile. I then embedded the purchasing buttons into the Shop page of my site and added the images & descriptions of the items. I also made sure that the page would be responsive (automatically adjust to different sized screens). Next, I had to figure out how to actually set up the payment options within ShopSite and integrate them with my band’s PayPal account so that the Shop could actually function. I realized that integrating ShopSite with PayPal was very confusing and after much frustration, decided to skip the middle man and simply use the preset online shop capabilities of PayPal to create purchasing buttons within the PayPal account, and use those instead of the ShopSite buttons. I succeeded in this task and now the shop is actually live. The band needs to login to their PayPal and adjust a few settings such as shipping preferences and maybe a few other personalizations, but other than that, the shop works.
Finally, since I got done these 2 main tasks which were my goals for the last 2 weeks, I decided to go ahead a little bit and work on the Events page. I originally was going to embed an online calendar into the page that my group could easily update by logging in to the website associated with that calendar, and I also wanted have a list of events on the page that I would just type in. However, I realized that a service such as Tockify allows users to create a calendar online that could also be viewed as a list of events automatically, just by clicking a button to change the view. I decided to use this service and embedded a calendar into my Events page.
Something major I learned this week about my project was how to set up an online shop successfully and implement it into a website. It was both easier, and at the same time more complex, than I had originally thought. The easier part was actually setting up the page on my website that contained the items. I realized that I could just insert images of the products and add descriptions, and all I needed to add from the online shopping service was the purchasing and “view cart” buttons. However, the complex part was figuring out how to actually accept payment and make sure the shop would function. I also learned about different ways to implement blogs into a website and about the theme customizations that are possible with blogging platforms such as Tumblr & Blogspot. Finally, I learned how to embed an online calendar into my site.
As far as my process, I pretty much found the same lesson I mentioned last week to continue being true (the fact that it’s better to get as many different parts of my site done as possible, even if imperfectly, and then go back to them at the end). My News page isn’t perfect, but it’s sufficient enough in how it functions, and at the end of my project I will go back and try to fix some of its imperfections, rather than focusing on fixing them these last 2 weeks and possibly not getting the Shop page done. The Shop page itself took a lot of time, but I got the overall design of that to function correctly as well. I will go back to it at the end and see if there’s any loose ends I need to tie up. This method of working seems to be very effective.
Something I learned about the design process in general was that it’s sometimes hard to predict which things will end up being difficult and which will end up being easy. As mentioned earlier, I was initially mistaken about which parts of creating the Shop page would be more and less complex. I also thought that the Calendar would be a bigger hassle than it actually was. Creating a whole blog from scratch and putting it on my site, however, I for some reason didn’t expect to be quite as confusing as research proved it to be. Fortunately, I figured out another way to implement a blog that works well too. Overall, this shows that you need to give yourself extra time when designing because you don’t always know how long things will take and it’s good to have some cushion, and also that you need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances that only become evident when you’re already in the process of designing.
ETHICS:
My site doesn’t have a whole lot of room for ethical discussion, but there are a few things that are notable to mention. Firstly, I am using alt tags on images in order to help people who may have vision impairments. Alt tags describe what that image is showing so that visually-impaired people who are using screen readers (software that reads aloud what’s on the page) can hear a description of the image and at least have some sense of what it is. Other accessibility considerations, such as adding captions/transcripts to video and audio content in order to help people with auditory problems, don’t really apply to my site because there are no videos, and the only audio content is music, which obviously cannot be properly reproduced with just captions. My site doesn’t have a whole lot of text content, though, and does have plenty of visuals, which is useful for people with possible cognitive impairments.
