Joseph
S. Cape

Portfolio

I built this portfolio website using Joomla! Initially, I built a prototype in HTML/CSS which formed the design skeleton. I decided that a simple and understated approach would be the most appropriate for this site. I created four main page elements to hold the website name (top left), main menu (bottom left), main content area (right) and footer (bottom) and creatively adjusted the border-width of each of these to give the site more colour and lead the eye onto different parts of the site.

Logo: The chacana, or Andean cross, is an important religious symbol in Incan culture and represents eternity, like an ever ascending set of steps. Like other crosses, it is a strong shape, and being simple to design in a graphics package, made a good choice to complement the rest of the website.

I built the website for Ellie Price's campaign for Vice President of Services for Edinburgh University in the student elections. I reviewed some pre-made templates with her and decided to adapt a public license template to her campaign brand, which had to be orange given the banners, posters and  other paraphenilia she had been using.

It was a short notice website, but it ranked first in Yahoo and Google for the search term 'Ellie Price VPS' and ensured that the message got out to the right people. Unfortunately Ellie didn't win, but it was an intrepid and well-managed campaign in which Ellie feels glad to have taken part.

I am in the process of giving the P&P student group a new website which they want to have to help attract attention for the next freshers' week. The main priority was to allow it to be updated regularly but avoid extensive updating via a website backend (whereas their previous site had fallen into disuse as no-one wanted to take this on). I took on this website as part of my MSc dissertation on integrating web quality measurement into the development process automatically: I first testing the Joomla! extensions which did this in a sandbox and then installed them on this site to test them in a live context.

My contributions to Cortometrajes, on which I worked for four months, included building new components, modules and plug-ins to add features and functionality into the site.

An example of this is an 'Auditorium' extension of a component that was designed to facilitate participation in online workshops for short cinema. I liased with the foundation who commisioned the site to discuss how they wanted to extend this and we arrived at a specification of a chat room set-up: the person who has been designated to lead the workshop can type into a main 'chat' box and see a selection of all the questions which other participants can ask, and which are displayed in a separate 'question box'. She or he can then click on any one of these and respond to it, both the question and response appearing in the main chat window.

This was designed to facilitate the pedagogical nature of the workshops and give greater control to the direction of the discusion than is possible in a conventional chat room.

My contribution to TV Ecuador (La Television) was to help run a campaign advertising a prize draw to win a holiday on a luxury cruise ship with Royal Caribean International which was open for two months before a winner was drawn. One problem arose from the wording used in the raffle which lead some entrants to believe they had won after receiving a confirmation of their entry!

My contribution to Ingesa was to modify a php script to automatically scale down shots that were taken by professional photographers and normally too weighty to be included directly in the site. We also wanted them to be able to add photos without mediating with us so a script was used to scale them down. This had to be refined after smaller images were rendered with jagged edges. I also worked on the bilingual aspect of the website.

Jane Cameron bases her artwork on synesthetic experience. The website is built using just HTML, CSS, php, mySQL, JavaScript and AJAX. It features an admin section which uses AJAX functions to asynchronically change the content of the frontpage. Since it was built without a CMS it was more of a task to ensure design continuity throughout the site which meant that everything except the main content area was stored in separate files and added in via php includes. This is bad for search engines. It also suffered from the last mile problem: it didn't generate enough interest to be finished properly or kept well-maintained. Still, not so bad for a first attempt.

As with Jane's site, this site involved a lot of hard maintenance work and strong version control since there was a lot of repeated content. Again, it demonstrates a functional design with the core technologies used in web development. A lot of work was put into coding an extensive administrative section, underpinned by AJAX. Functions for addition and deletion of events, news, pictures and messages were coded into the site. The site seems to have been used to advertise events such as a Ceileidh, marches and an AGM.