Thursday May 14th
I was off placement sick yesterday, so I found myself with some more deals to add to the Thriftway Site. I've now got quite a few holiday destinations to find attractive photos for. I fired through those pretty quickly, having gotten the process pretty well memorised these day. Doesn't help with the quality of information, as I've no tourist destination knowledge, but it gets them up there.
Other than this I spent a lot of the day working on the site, tweaking some aspects slightly and overhauling some aspects of the site a great deal. The majority of the work was undertaken on the Thriftway Travel Home Page, to bring it in line with the rest of the site. This involved adding the blue bars to the top of most sections, which helped highlight the Flight Search.
I was also able to rework the front page rotator to be a lot smarter than it had been previously. Beforehand it would always attempt to rotate the deals, which looked rather pathetic if there was only one deal on there. It was also odd to have the previous and next buttons there in such a case. Now, courtesy of an increased knowledge of the Wordpress coding, I was able to adapt it so that these features were only enabled whilst there was more than one deal to display. If there is only one, then they don't display and it has always been set up to disappear from the page in the event that there are no posts to display.
On the topic of better understanding the Wordpress coding, I have finally worked out where the code is that allows me to remove certain categories from the list of deals people can access. This might make people wonder "why?" but it is for a very simple reason. I have the flash banner on the site set up to make use of a Wordpress Category. This allows people to easily add or remove deals from the flash rotator. These posts lack the content of actual deals, but were still accessible. This has now been changed.
Tomorrow will probably consist of me finding images for the deals currently on the site and wondering why the heck I'm finding it so difficult to stay alert/conscious for a full working day. I find myself almost totally drained of energy from about 4:30pm.
Posted by Wulf on May 14, 2009, 7:12 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Tuesday May 12th
Today felt rather unproductive, I think I have finally managed to get the jQuery/javascript validation for the flight search engine sorted. I have, however, just realised that it requires some additional code to be added to the Single flight details page. i shall have to work on that tomorrow.
Aside from that I spent the day doing not a whole lot other than adding new deals to the website.
Posted by Wulf on May 12, 2009, 7:18 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Monday 11th May
Today I ironed out a few bugs in some of my code in the Thriftway Travel Site, primarily within the search engine on the home page. I also adapted the look of the categories to look a bit better and put identifying images into each category's single post designs.
Aside from this I got to watch Will deal with the most absurd series of events I have ever seen a designer have to deal with. Poor guy.
Posted by Wulf on May 11, 2009, 9:03 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
What I've been working on...
This weekend I have been working on a new interface for my Admin Panel. Whilst my current look is quite nice, it's also growing to become rather unweildy. Horizontal Navigation only goes so far before things get a little bit out of control after all:
Whilst it deals with a huge navigation menu a lot better than I had anticipated, it is growing increasingly unwieldy and frustrating to make use of. The idea behind both the current version and the new version is that it should be easy to use and somewhat intuitive in terms of usage. The current version is beginning to show some flaws in that regard, it can't handle the wealth of control being put into it any more... something new is needed.
That something new comes in the form of a new layout with new functionality and a greatly streamlined set of code running it all. It's still little more than a Work in Progress in terms of the majority of functions, but I have it already set up to allow me to add, edit and delete users as well as providing almost complete control over the blog posts displayed on the site. Still a long way to go in terms of functionality, but it currently looks like this:
There are quite a few changes in comparison to the original. There's a new breadcrumb navigation that lets you know where in the site are that will, eventually, allow you to click back through each aspect of the admin panel, even back to the main site itself. There is still a horizontal navigation menu, which I intend to use to display important links which is, as yet, undeveloped. The main body of the navigation is now on the left hand side and bundled into categories so that you only see the links you need to see, plus a selection of important links that will always be visible. The main body of the site is still the same, though the look and feel of it has been enhanced greatly to enhance both the looks and, more importantly, the usability of the sections.
The footer bar will contain some statistics about the site, such as number of viewable posts, number of comments made, as well as details on the currently signed in user. It will probably also contain details about the version of the admin panel. This will be the third incarnation of my admin panel. Boy has it developed a lot from it's XML driven roots.
Posted by Wulf on May 10, 2009, 3:10 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
Changes in Web Design
I've been working on one of my old portfolio pieces again of late, Write on Time. I've been updating it and making things even easier to use than they were before. Going over the code I've noticed two things.
- My coding skills have improved a great deal since coding the site.
- The capabilities of web design have changed vastly in the months since I coded the site.
What's changed things so much? From where I'm looking at things it's from the increased use of javascript libraries, such as mootools or, in my case, jQuery. The capability of these libraries is somewhat immense and I'm already putting new functionality into the site for the clients.
I've always been one who has shied away from using anything too fancy, or that will "break" when the functionality behind it all (javascript in this case) is turned off. But some of the functionality provided by these libraries is a must have, and a lot of it breaks in functional manners, leaving little reason for at least some of it to be left out...
Posted by Wulf on May 8, 2009, 10:05 pm with 0 comments - Permalink
