New Website to Write!

Great news! One of the best ways to learn, and definitely one of the best ways to teach yourself, is with real-world, practical situations. In many ways this blog and it's sister website are an excuse to do just that.

Even better though, someone has just asked me to re-write their whole site for them. The existing site is called www.terrificart.net. It's going to be a great way to learn a whole bunch of new things:

• Site Design
• Dealing with images
• User-editable dynamic content
• Slick, dynamic menus
• XML
• Advertising
• Transactions

Site Design

I'm not going to go crazy here as I'm no designer. I just want something which looks fresh, modern and above all simple, intuitive and easy to use.

Dealing With Images

Right now I could write what I know about this on a stamp, so there's a long way to go. Obviously the images and there presentation is absolutely key to this project. I'll be looking to make cool slide-shows, expanding pop-outs and the like. I'm also interested in getting the images cached early for slicker usage.

User-editable dynamic content

Another key element in the design of the site. I want to set up a couple of forms where the site's owners can edit, add and delete artworks on the site.

Slick Dynamic Menus

As the content is dynamic the menus will need to be to.

XML

The key to managing the dynamic content and menus will be the use of XML. I'm hoping to use one simple XML element definition to refer to the artworks listed on the site. There is a massive amount of learning to do here, not just the XML itself but also the JAVA that handles the XML element(s) I set up.

Advertising

I want to get some simple advertising working on the site - again a totally new area for me.

Transactions

I want people to be able to order directly from the site and this will come when everything else is in place. Again, I have no idea about this just now, but I'm going to learn.


So there is an immense amount of learning to do here. I'm going to start with the XML, get my structure defined and some JAVA functions defined to access and modify the XML elements. Next up I'll probably look at the image handling and then the menus. Once these three main areas are sorted I should have the bones of a working site.

At this stage I'll take a look at the general design and feel of the site, like I said earlier - not going too mad. After that it's a case of bolting on the advertising and transactions.

It's going to take a while I reckon.