Website Sustainability

1. Introduction The project started by looking at 'rescuing' a site (www.emkn.org) by copying content to a Google Site version. The advantages and disadvantages have been found for this approach, and some suggestions have come out of the project. 2. Why Google Sites? Google Sites (www.google.com/sites/overview.html) was investigated initially as a suitable 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 supports native RSS feeds for: o Announcements pages o Comments o Recent site activity • It integrates with a number of Google-based tools (such as Analytics, Webmaster tools, YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa). 3. What we found? As each page essentially needs to be provide individually (producing templates of portions of the site help, but each page does need to be produced i...

Adam Ostrow: After your final status update | Video on TED.com Not really about web sustainability directly...but the whole idea about digital legacy. Taken from TED.com: Many of us have a social media presence -- a virtual personality made up of status updates, tweets and connections, stored in the cloud. Adam Ostrow asks a big question: What happens to that personality after you've died? Could it ... live on?

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 ...