Community website design

This community

The Senni Community Web site has been planned to be set up in the following way by a 'Webmaster', who will organize and publish material to the website.

(1) A small front page: website overview; a link to the Index page; a word search function; one or two pictures; a copyright statement; a commercial use statement;
(2) An Index page listing and linked to all the Chapter headings and subheadings for easy navigation
(2) An Overview page about the website: its background and purposes; disclaimers; terms of use; privacy and cookies policy; list of financial sponsors; names of those working on the website and how to contact them
(3) A Table of contents page, linking to specific information pages (the meat of the website) laid out as Chapters leading from general information to separate pages with specific information in Subheadings pages
(4) An online message board could be setup if there was enough interest
(5) There will be separate English and Welsh versions of each page that contains text. These will be linked to each other and be present in the same directory in the web. The pages will be given an English or Welsh name, depending on how it was first submitted, with the suffix _C.html for Welsh (Cymraeg) submissions or _E.html for Engish submissions to distinguish them. If there is no translation available, the page will not exist. This will make it easier to check which ones have still to be translated. Pages without text will not be duplicated.
(6) A page could have links to other community-based websites
(7) The web could request usernames and passwords to access some or the entire web. When logged in, users could be asked for new contributions to add currency to the web.
(8) Statistics could be collected by the ISP on how the web is used. This costs somewhat more.

Each page could be have, in Welsh or English
(a) a top panel showing the name of the web; the title of the Chapter; the title of the subsection; a relevant background graphic image; a link to the other language version of the page
(b) a bottom panel with links to the previous and next pages, the front page and the Index page
(c) a left panel with links to pages related to the current page; a relevant background graphic image
The main part of the page would be text or images, containing the page content and identifying the author and date it was updated

The web should have, in the computers where it is being managed and served out, a directory and file structure corresponding to the Chapters and Subheadings listed on the Index page. Graphics and other non-text items are stored in the directory of the principal page that links to them. to make it easier to manage them. Non-text pages that are linked from several pages are stored in either the main directory referring to them, or if many are involved, in the highest directory where a page refers to them.

The web should be created and updated with a popular and well-structured commercial web-creation package that will allow selected people to update parts of the web that interest them. I suggest Microsoft FrontPage 2002 or Dreamweaver MX 2004 v 7. A database will be needed as soon as the web begins to grow and become interactive. For this, I suggest Cardbox Server* or Microsoft Access 2002. The scripting language could be PHP and/or JavaScript and use XML and HTML.

The web should be hosted on a reliable and fast server.

Backups and 'snapshots' of the web should be made as it develops, stored on CD-R and DVD-R disks kept in at least two well-separated locations.

Graphics files should have a size of no more than 500 pixels in the longer direction, in 250 colours, to ensure that they are less than 300-KB, otherwise they take up too much space on the server and are slow to download. However, full-sized copies of the graphics files will be kept in an Adobe 'Album' v 2 database, as these may be needed for Archive purposes.

*The Webmaster has made a Cardbox database of all the pages in the web, with fields corresponding to Chapters and subsections. Material for the website will go first into web page(s) which will then be listed in this database. Edited pages will be published by FrontPage 2002 to 'senni.org.uk' on the servers at IX Web Hosting. At some stage, the database could be put online with graphics files, if this was needed as an  'Archive' of the pictures in the web.

YACS is software designed for a Community web. The Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand has a well structured 'Community Net' in two languages.

Other communities: