Setting up for webcasting

Most of today has been spent setting up the cameras and equipment for a webcast on Friday. Seaghan can't be there so it will be myself and Andrew, so it's going to be much more of a challenge! Luckily I've helped out on the last two webcasts so that's been good experience, and Seaghan talked me through setting everything up so it should hopefully all go according to plan! So I will be communicating with the venue about the setup, and then myself, Trevor and Andrew will be going down on Thursday to set up for Friday.

We had some problems the last few times with the overload of information; updating the current bids in Wirecast sometimes causes the programme to crash as it can't cope with such speedy updates. To get around this, we are using Telestream Desktop Presenter, which will communicate with a Powerpoint presentation on which we will display the bids. This means the information isn't being logged directly to Wirecast, meaning that it uses up less resources and hopefully a smoother run of the auction. So I'm looking forward to the new challenge!

Inkling museum project

Today we had a meeting with the director of the local museum to see if she would be interested in allowing us to create an app using Inkling for free, something that visitors can use to guide their way around the museum. We showed her our initial prototype and she was very positive about it. They have several other e-learning initiatives on the go at the moment, some of which our project very much ties in with. She was particularly interested in the 'guided tour' feature of Inkling, where the user can click on an image, which then zooms in on a particular part of that image. This means the user could focus on, for example, a particular artefact in a room, which would be a really useful feature.

 

Search engine optimisation

Trevor is working on optimising a client's website for search engines, and I am helping out to learn more about SEO. Yesterday, we went through the Google AdWords keyword planner tool, providing information on the website's landing page and the keywords we thought might be useful to optimise for. The planner then provides a list of related words, the amount of searches for those words, and the amount of competition for optimisation. This way you can get a good idea of which keywords will be good to optimise for; the best ones tend to be highly searched terms with low to medium competition. We made a list of words and pages on the site to optimise for, and we should be starting that today.

Use cases

This week I've been working on use cases for a site we are developing for a client. The objective here is to show what each different type of user can do and what they have access to. It serves as a guide to the functionality of the site, both for the developer and the client while the site is in development.

Shopping Cart - J2Store

Myself and Andrew were creating a website this week for an Irish language learning resources company. They want to focus more on getting online orders than they previously had. Digilogue decided that the best solution for that was to use the J2 Store component. What this does is make articles into items for sale. You can then click the 'add to cart' button within the article and create your order this way. In order to specify an article as an item for sale, you use the J2 Store tab within the article to enable the cart, set the price and enable shipping. You can create shipping methods within the J2Store component itself.

This is a really handy way to create shopping cart functionality. However, it doesn't link to a database which means you have to update quantities manually.

I also created pop-out images for the site using the JCE MediaBox plugin for JCE Editor. This involved linking a thumbnail image to a larger image so that when you click on the thumbnail, a lightbox featuring the larger image appears. This gives a nice detailed view of the products.