Australian Institute for International Affairs - Case Study Example

Site Re-Design Document Australian Institute for International Affairs (AIIA) Contents Australian Institute for International Affairs (AIIA) 2 Topic and Description 4 Name 4 Description 4 Site Analysis 6 Proposed changes 8 Home page Lay out 8 Gathering participant News 9 Improvement on backup system 11 Improvement to event booking system 13 Donations plug-in change 16 Topic and Description Name The name of the website is Australian Institute of International affairs. The URL for the website shall remain www.aiia.asn.au. The name and URL shall be retained so as not to have denial of service and 404 errors for the current audience. It shall also mean that the developers of the site will not have to go through the rigors of changing URL and site title. Description The Australian Institute of International Affairs is an independent, non-profit organisation promoting interest in and understanding of international affairs in Australia. The AIIA arranges more than a hundred and fifty conferences and or public lectures a year across it seven branches in Australia. It also publishes books and journals giving Australian position and of Australia on international issues. The current site is built on Joomla 1.5 CMS. There was no availably ready site map or tree diagram showing the layout of the pages but the pages are neatly laid out and the navigation is easy to follow. The site also has share tools and social media options to follow the oragnisation on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and to share the site via email. The site has a lot of worded information but it is neatly laid out and with a little bit of patience the user will be able to find it. Site Analysis The site is analyses is summarized in the table below. Purpose of site The purpose of the website is to provided content for the audience of AIIA. It provides digital resources like books, transcripts, journals and videos. It also serves the purpose of providing information of upcoming events ran by the AIIA. There should be booking functionality embedded into this system. This site also serves the purpose of donation collection. There is a tool to allow prospective donors and well-wishers to donate funds to the organization since it is a nonprofit making organization. Finally the site is supposed to allow the audience to post their comments on issues up for discussion on the website. It should also work by collection of audience stories and comments on stories the organization writes (crowd sourcing). Target Audience The target audience will be: Male and female Age group 16+ Students in fields of international affairs and watchers of international affairs. Page Layout & Design The site does not have any content that is redundant. The contents are useful, interesting and useful to target audience. Also the contents are well written and easy to scan as the content is represented in categories. Categories are also well-planned and named with interesting titles. The content on a single page is appropriate for the page and there doesn’t seem to be any misplaced content on the website. Information is presented with enough white space which makes it more readable. Graphics, Fonts, Colours Graphics are used quite effectively. The size of images is appropriate according to site design. Uses of the media such as videos are suitable too. The slider on the home page summarizes most of the content on the website and is appropriately sized for the site design. The main font type used here is sans serif. But two to three font sizes are used which is suitable because they are well balanced. The site uses a white and washed out blue color scheme. The images are nicely blended with color scheme and create well-coordinated, consistent and pleasing design. Overall visitor's experience The content is neatly categorized the navigation system is intuitive easy to follow and find content on desires to find.. The site contains a number of links which are useful, interesting, well grouped and well presented. They are however in some cases overly extensive and tend to be more than desirable. This makes the navigation menu difficult to read and keep up with Page length of the site is appropriate according to the content. Spelling & Grammar; errors No spelling and grammar error. Proposed changes Home page Lay out Figure 1 Website of Swedish Institute for International Affairs The inspiration for changing the home page of AIIA website came from the Swedish Institute of international affairs website pictured above. Proposed Change Justification Move social media and share button to the top of the page. The AIIA website has share buttons but the user has to scroll to the bottom of the page. Going by most web users do not scroll to the bottom of a page we would like to propose that the buttons and share tools all be moved to the top of the page as they are in the Swedish Institute of International Affairs website. Move latest transcript to the top of the page. The local transcripts link provides information on emerging issues that many site visitors will be interested in getting when they visit the site, this content has been rightly placed on the home page but is also at the bottom of the page and as such would be difficult to locate at first glance. We therefore propose to move it to a more prominent position at the top of the page. We suggest reducing the length of the upcoming events pane and appending the latest transcripts pane to it where it can be seen as soon as the page is loaded. Change design of donate button The donate button on this website is a pale blue, it looks subdued and dull and is easily “swallowed” by the rest of the content. The button also does not explicitly state what mode of donation or payment platform is to be used to make the donation. We propose that the button be replaced with a more ubiquitous button say for example the PAY PAL button which invokes trust seeing as PayPal is a trusted money transfer method. It should also have clearly displayed logos of other payment service providers like Master Card and Visa. Gathering participant News The current site requires a user to log in to post comments, events and stories. This is some-what tedious and does not make it easy to share one’s posts. We propose that the site install a social media log in mechanism. This will allow a user to log in using Facebook, Twitter, linked in or other socials media. Every time they post content it shows up on their social media time lines. This gets the site more traffic and cuts out the tedious process of having to log in by the user. It also makes sure we do not have to validate the user’s contacts and names. These come straight from face their social media accounts. It also means that the user does not need to create a new username and password for this web site. The appropriate social media plug in for Joomla is available and needs to be configured for use on this website as a log in option. It also means that users do not need to log in or create a new account just to post new comments. This has an overall domino effect of getting the site noticed on social media while cutting out the process of logging in thus “killing two birds with one stone.” Figure 2 Icon for the Arra Plug in We recommend the Arra plugin for Joomla found at: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/site-access/authentication-cloud-based/21560 This plug in is capable of allowing users to log in to your site using the Facebook API calls. This gives them most of the privileges of a logged in user and has the ability to pick from facebook other data like email address, friends, where a user lives and access to their facebook AVI allowing us to have a picture of the user to display without violating any privacy and or copy right rules and laws. Improvement on backup system For backing up data, there are two possible methods. The first will mean there are regular scheduled backups manually or automatically carried out. This data would then be stored on to another online server or in off line media. If the current data set is found to be in one way or another compromised the it would be taken down and the backup uploaded instead. This could be by methods as unsophisticated as having the web master save the data using MySQL work bench PHP my admin or other such tools and store the backup copy on different media. The site files would then be backed up using FTP and also kept in offline media. Figure 3 Manual back up cycle The alternative of this method is to get a plug in for Joomla that will handle the back ups at scheduled intervals. We recommend AKEEBA plug in for Joomla found at http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/site-security/backup/1606 This plug in is capable of database only, database and site or site only back up modes. The backups can then be stored on an alternative backup server and incase the first server is in accessible a redirect will be placed on the current domain to send the visitors to the backup server instead. Figure 4 The logo for Akeeba plug in Improvement to event booking system There are two options for improving the event booking system are first to build a plug in for the event booking system which was already investigated as an option. The option was found to be possible but not feasible since it would take too much time and technical expertise to build a new Joomla plug in. The second option was to install an already build plug in for event booking. The event booking plug in found at http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/calendars-a-events/events/events-registration/13701 was recommended. It seemed to have all the features required by AIIA and surpasses the current event booking system. The plug in is both free and open source with appropriate documentation and support available for most of the functionality. Webmail Services Web mail services are provided by the web host service provider. There are a number of well-known applications that would help service providers provide web mail data to the end users. These applications are open source and free to use. These include but are not limited to Cube, Squirrel, Horde and Simple Mail. If these services are not currently installed on the AIIA server than we propose installing more than one of these services. The end users shall be provided with a choice on which of the services they would like to use. A link should be provided from the home page of the web site to the URL: http://www.aiia.asn.au/webmail This should open a page with a number of applications and the user would have to pick their preferred application to open their webmail account with. There is either the option of providing adequate training to the email account holders on how to navigate their email accounts and how to perform the usual tasks of an email account ie deleting, composing and replying email. The web master shall have the task of creating the email accounts for the end users, (s)he shall also have the task of assigning the email accounts their relevant quotas and passwords. The end users shall then decide if they like to change the email passwords. The web master shall also have the onus of making sure that email accounts do not exceed their quotas and also increase quotas when and where necessary. Alternatively the webmaster could opt for a plug in. The best recommended in this case is open source but premium. Open Source Excellence is open source but premium to use. There is no license fee which is renewable every year, use is unlimited but there is a download fee and an annual subscription for support services. It makes it much simpler to configure webmail on servers also allows the web master the ability to send news letters to his audience. Figure 5 Icon for Open Source Excellence Donations plug-in change The OS donate plugin for Joomla was recommended to replace the current donation system. The plug in by Nick Savov is both open source and free. It is simple to use and connects directly to one’s paypal account seamlessly. The plug in can be found at http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce/donations/16006 This plug in will bring the well needed colour to the home page and stand out more. It also displays the well trusted Paypal logo and other credit card services like master card and American Express. Figure 6 The OS Donate plug in icon Read More