IAD: Womens Football Coverage.. can this hinder or promote?

The topic I am studying is sport websites.

Initially I was going to look at different sport websites and compare two, and comparing a site dedicated to sport only and a site that has an area of the main website dedicated to sport.

However after looking through sports websites I then decided to categorise my evaulation and make it football specific. This then initiated my second and current idea....

WOMENS FOOTBALL V MENS FOOTBALL

Having played womens football for the majority of my life, I would be very interested in looking into how the coverage for both Womens and Mens football differs and whether one is more dominating than the other.

Mens football is definately much more popular in the UK and this is obvious simply by looking at the difference in wages between a professional male footballer against the wages of a professional female footballer.. ALOT!!

Over the next week I will be looking at this in more details and will report on my findings in the next blog....





Sites that may be of help..
http://www.fgmag.com/ - dedicated to womens football
http://www.footballresults.org/ - dedicated to football results in all competitions... accept the womens??

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/default.stm - Covers all football..
but only has a small area for womens football


Questions to look at:
Does this hinder the future of womens football?
Will promoting womens football online help the game improve?
Does this differ in the USA with soccer?

IAD: Linked data

http://www.linkedata.org/ - image of some linked data, although the image is rather confusing as you cant really work out what each bubble represents, or whether the size of the arrow has a particular meaning.

The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can find other, related, data.

Like the web of hypertext, the web of data is constructed with documents on the web. However, unlike the web of hypertext, where links are relationships anchors in hypertext documents written in HTML, for data they links between arbitrary things described by RDF,. The URIs identify any kind of object or concept. But for HTML or RDF, the same expectations apply to make the web grow:

* Use URIs as names for things

* Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

* When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL)

* Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

Simple. In fact, though, a surprising amount of data isn't linked in 2006, because of problems with one or more of the steps. This article discusses solutions to these problems, details of implementation, and factors affecting choices about how you publish your data

IAD: RSS on this blog

I have now added to RSS feeds on to my blog, the first one being my blog for my WDP project.
Second is Chris Wallace's blog the tutor for this module.

DMP: Current CMS

Well my cms progress appears to be abit scattered at the moment as theres so much to do im trying to work out what bit to start first, where most of the time and effort is going to be needed and get some structure to my to do list!

This week ive mainly looked a bit at every different section rather than starting at each so I have a rough idea what I need to for each section.

The visual design im not too worried about so I havent looked much into this as I feel this is one of my strong points and wont take as much self learning or time!!

The UCD - I have started to put together a prototype, I've made it on powerpoint as its easy to make a button hyperlink to another slide and you can present the interactivity between the user and the site easily. I will put this online soon and provide the blog with a link. When making this prototype the first thing I realised was the CMS is going to run on the private side of the site however there is also a public side of the site that will also need to be designed and looked at in detail.. I have decided to leave this section until the end of project as my main scope and personal aim is to get the cms side of the site working as this is what I will be marked on and what will take the most time, so I will use image and text holders for the public page until everything else is complete and then if there is time left over or after the project I will work on this.


Technical side -

How do I get started.. what template to use??

I have decided to use the same template I have used in many php project because I am familiar with the layout and how to set about working around it.
Therefore I have used the same template I used last year in many projects and you can see this here. This is currently where I am playing around with code and trying to get the basics going such as search bar, list of companies once added to the database etc.



Generally -

In general I am happy with the progress although I feel it needs more structure such as a to do list.

step 1. this
step 2. this etc.

I will be working more on this tommorrow where I am going to look at the list of objectives where I want to be at the end of november and set up a monthly plan so I can get cracking!!

I am also going to be setting a time at the end of each week where I will be writing up on the report this way I shouldn't get too carried away with the designing!!

IAD - WEEK 3.. presentation preparation

When I initially searched for sport latest news, most of the results were sub pages on main websites such as:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport
http://www.skysports.com/
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/latest/

There weren’t really many sites that were simply dedicated to sport but more so websites that had covered sport as a sub section to the website.
I made many different searches such as sport dedicated websites, latest sport news etc.

Top of every search was the BBC website which is also a personal favourite and when I’m looking for latest sport, particularly football I’ll log on to BBC.


The other website I found that was dedicated simply to sport and didn’t just have sport as a section of a larger site was Sporting Life.
I have decided to compare these two and look at the good and bad areas of both websites.

IAD: Web Application tools: presentation

Browser Shots
For my web application tool presentation, I spoke about browser shots, which is an application tool that allows you to enter a domain and the application will then send of the domain to many virtual computers and return screen shots for the domain in many different browser, and operating systems.

There are some limitations to this application as it isnt instant, and can take some time to return results. It also doesnt allow you to look at the browser interaction and how that varies in different browsers.

However in general this is a very good tool as you can see quickly how your site will look on many different browsers, including whether flash is enabled, java enabled etc.
Browser shots also looks at the file size of the page and the dimensions which can also be very useful.

IAD: Web Application tools

I looked at website I have recently made and used the evaluation tools below to look at what errors occur here are my findings:

http://wave.webaim.org/report?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.andbuilders.co.uk
When I enterred andbuilders site into the wave accessibility tool it came up with a few errors, mainly that there is javascript and flash present and this could be unaccessable to certain users.

I also looked at what the website looks like in different types of browsers by using browershots.org which takes screenshots of your website in many different browsers you can quickly see the differences, if any in different browsers.
http://browsershots.org/http://andbuilders.co.uk/

IP look ups, for this section I looked at dnsstuff.com and entered ANDbuilders.co.uk again and it came up with all the domain details including when it was registered, when it is up for renewal the name it is registered under and the address, this could be really helpful for someone that wanted a particular domain and wanted to know when it was up for renewal again or to contact the current owner.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois/?tool_id=66&token=&toolhandler_redirect=0&ip=www.andbuilders.co.uk

Link Valet : A very useful site that looks at the website and all the listed links on a website, which it then checks to make sure they are active and not a broken link.
http://valet.webthing.com/link/link.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.andbuilders.co.uk&date=2001-01-01&type=Full&depth=1


http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso

The above website requires you to enter the domain and then returns how fast it takes to downloads pages, images, links etc. This is very helpful as a webdesigner as it helps to understand why some pages may not be viewed as much if there are aspects that are taking too long to download.



I enjoyed looking at the different evaluation techniques and will definately continue to use a few of these when developing future websites.

DMP: WEEK 1

Today I have started my blog for year 3 project which I have chosen to build a simple CMS for a building estate website. The CMS will be a big learning curve for me and I feel it will help develop my back end skills, such as PHP, MySql etc.

My cms will be for a building estate which has 20+ companies on them and I will use Dawkins Estate for my project as I have already been approached by one of the companies to try and create this idea. The site will allow the companies to communicate with each other on the website upload their business details and let everybody know what they can do for each other and improve networking on the estate. It will also give security/police the ability to post private messages to all companies on any recent crime or suspicious activities happening in the local area.

To do this I will need to have a user log in area and on here the companies admin can upload recent new etc, photo's if needed or message other companies.