On Monday (Mar 15) the group had a 3 hour meeting with the client to get some information sorted out for the e-commerce portion of the website. As of the writing of this posting, we are still waiting for financial information to be confirmed in order to go ahead with the Paypal account. So the store is still offline and will not be up and running before Tuesday (Mar 23rd) as we had hoped. But we did get the site launched live on schedule and the client has already (as of that day) started to make postings in the blog portion of the site. We also received approval on a logo and have added that to the website banner.
Bears Matter SMS Ad for Anti-Trophy Hunting Campaign
The site was presented to the class on Tuesday and there were some concerns about the load time of the site, in particular, there seems to be a lag navigating from some of the “static” pages in the site to the blog (home) page. I have spent just over 7 hours this week working on getting the site optimized to increase the speed of the page load. I have been using Website Optimization and Octagate site timer to analyze the load time of the site. I have also been using information on a variety of Joomla! user forums to help optimize the site. Based on what I have found in my research, I have deleted all unused template files, modules and plugins that we are not actively using, I’ve also disabled the automatic Twitter feed, and I have also archived any and all articles that are greater than 1 year old. Doing all of this has, according to the two site testers, cut down the load time by 11.88 seconds! I still need to look at compression of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to further decrease the load time.
This week I also spent 2.5 hours editing some imagery for the client to create a business sized ad for publication in some BC University newspapers, and also for use for flyer handouts. I also set up a Gmail account for the client to use for the site rather than her personal email account.
I have also been working on my website for 320. I was actually having issues with getting the navigation drop down menu to work properly. It’s still a little buggy but getting there. I tried to simplify my CSS but it just was not working, so I have adapted and cleaned up code that I have used before and it is significantly better. The site is making good progress, I just need a little bit more written content from my client to flesh it out further; I have plenty of images now!
I was thrilled to finally get the code to pull the information I wanted out of my database for the PHP project (thanks Doug!). It was further refined and now the resulting presentation is really looking a lot better (i.e. cleaner). I also figured out how to get the status to pull out of the tables and show correctly (i.e. In and not “1″). So there is definite progress coming on this one too. I am cautiously optimistic that “I think I get it”!
