Website Sustainability

One of the comments that came out from the user's survey was about searching the 'Tube Map'.    3.  Perhaps a search box on this page that users could use to quickly locate the item on the map would complement the site. A partial solution was to add a search, that search the site. this has been achieved using Google Custom Search to the www.sustainablity.net site (see below) To create the search, yo u need a Google account and then go to  http://www.google.com/cse/ Create a new Custom Search Engine and decide what sites you want to include, the name of the search and whether you want to pay.  For this project I went for the free/standard edition option which means there will be adverts, as well as the search results from the site.  When you include the sites to search the format does matter to get it to search the whole you will need to put * at the end, so for example  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/*  to search all of...

A central feature of the site is the 'Tube map',  a graphical representation of the services on offer.  So a survey of these features on the site  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/   was carried out. Overall the respondents were satisfied or held no strong views with they way it looks. People seemed reasonably happy with the ability to find what they wanted on the site. Most people either thought the layout was right for them or didn't have strong views either way. From those that disagreed there were not further comments to help find out what the problem was. Most people thought they would use the site. The person that stated they strongly disagreed went on to say " Site contains lots of useful info that I was not aware was available " and on all other aspects of the survey had been positive about the site. These are results are indicative only as the sample size is small (10 respondents) When asked improving the navigation of the tube map ...

A  survey  of these features on the site  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/  was carried out. To get a sense of the areas of interest of the respondents they were asked to select the occupations that best reflects them. Managers, students and Other coming out the strongest. All agree that the layout was right for them. All agree that the navigation was easyfor them. All agree, for them, it was easy to find what they were looking for. When asked   Please add any comments or suggestions you feel appropriate on the navigation.    1. Find the site easy to navigate, easy to find the information that I am looking for, would be happy to see further devleopment of site    2. Material was easier to find and navigation flowed well. Layout clear and not cluttered with too much info. When you have selected the services menu it displays a further menu of the options available under services. It may be useful to also to display the further...

Stage 1 Rescue the site. Capture a copy of the site. Software selected for this job is the free software WinHTTrack Website Copier ( http://www.httrack.com/ ). It is easy to install and use. Keep back-up copies in several places just in case. For more details click here . Temporary hosting: dropbox is a good choice. You can transfer the static HTML content straight in a public folder. For more details  click here  on moving a site to dropbox and for some of the issue click here . Add Google Analytics Select a free hosting site.  Option 1: A Google Sites solution was investigate Google Sites (www.google.com/sites/overview.html) has been selected as the alternative platform for several reasons:  It is a freely available resource, allowing this approach to be replicated with other at risk resources. It allows changes for individual pages or the entire site remotely by subscription  It integrates with a number of Google-based tools (such a...

As an alternative free hosting option I have started looking at Amazon's web service. Go to  http://aws.amazon.com/free/ To give some idea of why I have copied details in quote below from http://aws.amazon.com/free/ "AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month): 750 hours of  Amazon EC2  Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month * 750 hours of an  Elastic Load Balancer  plus 15 GB data processing* 10 GB of  Amazon Elastic Block Storage , plus 1 million I/Os, 1 GB of snapshot storage, 10,000 snapshot Get Requests and 1,000 snapshot Put Requests * 5 GB of  Amazon S3  standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests * 30 GB per of internet data transfer (15 GB of data transfer “in” and 15 GB of data transfer “out” across all services except Amazon CloudFront) * 25  Amazon SimpleDB  Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage ** 100,000 Requests of ...

Social networks (Facebook and Twitter) have been trialed as a method of getting the survey out to a wider audience. First route: all the Blogs have been sent out on Facebook and twitter . The 140 character including the URL means it has to short and to the point. LinkedIn has also been tried as another social networking route. Sent out as a post with the a request for help and a link to the survey. This route was included because of the nature of the LinkedIn it can be targeted to those those who are in organisations the site is aimed at. How effective these are we must wait to see. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at: http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c please feel free to fill it in or http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=cec22f0a-e467-4c15-a319-74d96bb...

Before starting to migrate the site from a hosted server to a Google sites, capturing the current web contents as static HTML has some benefits: -Even though Google sites does allow for direct importing of HTML. HTML can be added to a Google Site. -Provides all the images in one go. Software selected for this job is the free software WinHTTrack Website Copier ( http://www.httrack.com/ ). It is easy to install and use. This work has been supported by funding from JISC. The site can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/emknorg/ or  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/emkn/ Survey about this material can be found at:  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c  please feel free to fill it in or  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=cec22f0a-e467-4c15-a319-74d96bb8ed9d

To get more feedback an on-line survey has been produced using eSurveysPro ( http://www.esurveyspro.com ). eSurverysPro is a free on-line package that lets you produce surveys and email them out or provide a link. A selection of emails addresses, taken from the EMKN site, were used to invited people to take part, as these are people who may be interested in the site. The reasons  eSurveysPro ( http://www.esurveyspro.com ) was selected was: It offers a free on-line service; Invites of up to 50 people in a month can be sent from a free account; Anonymity - IP or email address of respondents won't be collected; There is an option for people to withdraw themselves from the list. If you would like to take part in the survey, it can be found at:  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=67775a0a-336f-45a5-a222-2f1a6615752c

As well as moving the site to a more sustainable hosting solution we would like to make it more sustainable by increasing the number of people visiting the site. Making the site more accessible to search engines or Search Engine Optimisation is key to this. To trial this the following have be trialled on the  http://www.web-sustainablity.net/  site. Keywords Try to limited to six keywords. Description:   A short summary description of the page not the site. From Google's suggestion of  best practice Accurately summarise the page's content Create unique descriptions for each page (where possible). Title - Create accurate and unique titles. From Google's suggestion of best practice Accurately describe the page's content Create unique title tags for each page Use brief, but descriptive title Approach taken was make the title up using two approaches  Either First "East Midlands Knowledge Network:" and the second part made up of the University ...

As the work on the project continues, we learn how to make the transfer of the pages quicker, but also we come across new difficulties and challenges. An important enhancement of our work was done when we started using templates for creating new pages. By default Google Sites offer the users a few templates: Web Page, Announcements, File Cabinet and List. However, the users may easily create new templates to suit their needs. For the purpose of the website 8 new templates were created – one for each of the main menu items: Business Performance, Creative Services, Enterprise Development, Networking & Good Practise, New Product Development, Process Improvement, Recruitment & Development and Technological Services. Each template contains a decoration bar with the picture of a tube line and a submenu of appropriate colour. Thanks to this there is no need to spend time on creating every page from the scratch – it can now be done by just one click. It is planned to create a similar ...

The figure above shows the summary of the usage overall; with a relatively large rise in the numbers of page views in July 2016. One of the most popular traffic source is probably due to the short post about can be Skydrive be used to host webpages  Can Skydrive be used as free  ho sting. (see table at the end of the post) A welcome surprise was the number of page views from the countries other than the UK (with the United States being the largest group).