Dorset Humanists Forum

The development of the website is far from going according schedule, but I have been making progress. I have set up a forum for us to discuss different topics, such as Humanist issues and activities of the group. I hope that the forum will encourage people to participate with the Dorset Humanists.

Here is a link to the forum: www.forum.dorsethumanists.co.uk

Development Plan

Since the committee meeting I have been hard at work reading and designing the new stages of the website. I am reading many books on PHP, MySQL, AJax and Java Script so that I can master the technologies that are needed to make the website work properly.

As you can see there are so many elements to add to the website to get it working that I have had to sort it out on my board.

I want to develop the website in a number of phases culminating in the completion of the second version of the site. The first phase, which should be completed soon, is the development of the database and the pages that are designed to interact with the data stored within the database. The second phase, which is to be completed by the 24th of Feb, is the design of the user system which should allow people to log on and have privileges. The third and final phase, which should be completed by the next committee meeting on the 8th March, is the addition of other technologies such as RSS etc.

Second Update

So far the design of the website has come to a stop. There are a number of reasons for this delay. The most important reason why the development has been delayed is the next stage in the site’s development is a difficult step because it involves a lot of programming and database design. However, when this stage in the design is complete it will make the website much better because it will enable the group to add their own content.

One of the factors that have held back the website is that whenever someone has had new content to put on the website it has been the web designer's responsibility to upload it. This has held back the website from performing its role, and soon this problem will be rectified.

On the 18th of January the Dorset Humanists held a committee meeting in which the website development was discussed and two booklets were given out about the its development. The first booklet was a guide to using the e-mail boxes supplied by our website host, and the second was a general booklet on the development of the website so far. Up until now the development of the website has been slow, but now that the committee is interested in interacting in its development it seems that we can move on to create a website which will suite the needs of the Dorset Humanists rather than the webmaster anticipating what is best.

At the committee meeting we spoke about several topics including: how committee members will be able to update the website, how we could produce an email newsletter, forum, blogs, news feeds etc. Not all of these ideas will be acted upon in the immediate future, but is it important that the issues were discussed. It was also agree that the website ought to be up and running with some of these elements in by next month’s committee meeting.

First Update

The website began development quite a few months ago. However, lack of time has meant that it has developed very slowly. In the initial few months I had to get to grips with CSS formatting techniques.

Moreover, the obstacle which needed to be overcome was the layout of the page. It was felt that it would be best to have the menu running along the left-hand side of the page. In the initial stages I experimented with some CSS style techniques found on the web. The image below shows the site as it was initially:

Nevertheless, this layout seemed rather cluttered, and proved hard to extract information from. After a long time trying to develop a better, and more compliant layout. I had many problems trying to find a layout which works properly in Internet Explorer, Firefox and other explorers.

Alas, I decided not to procrastinate any longer and develop the website I had in mind, which is not as compatible with Firefox as I hoped. I like the new layout because it offers a more accessible layout which presents a main text a lot more clearly. The image below shows the site as it is now:

With the text spaced out the website is much easier to read. In my next post I will go into more detail into the structure of the website, and how it will be changing further. One problem, as I have said is encountered in Firefox, where the menus do not display properly. The picture below shows this: