The Innocent Statement

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Wow, life is busy!

I am sorry dear readers (if there are any of you left by now) that I have neglected this website (both in content, and redesign). My only excuse, granted not a good one, is that life is busy. Hopefully I can back this up now, with examples of some projects, both big and small, that we have finished of late. These I will hopefully be able to tell you about over the next few entries.

Engvocab.com

The biggest project that I have been managing over the last months is www.engvocab.com, and yes you've guessed it, it still isn't finished. But we are getting there! As far as the timeline goes, this project has taken longer than we originally anticipated. The site is half English, and half Japanese, but has/is been developed so that it will be easy to add other language versions in the future. Check out the current mini-site that is in place for more information on what exactly it is, and if you know anyone that teaches English (specifically to Japanese speakers first off), please point them to it, because it is going to become a great learning tool.

Engvocab.com

The obstacles involved with engvocab.com are new ones for us, and we have enjoyed overcoming them. Building a truly multi-lingual site is a lot harder than I expected it to be. It not just a matter of translating pages, because this site is going to also become a learning web application. So elements within application pages also need to be translatable, and error/feedback messages and emails send to the user, and more. It's been great to spend some time finding the best solution to these problems, and because we have done the hard work now, we should benefit greatly in the future.

Another interesting aspect of making engvocab.com has been the sound recording. That's right, sound recording. Why? Because there is a English Vocabulary Sound bank built into the web application. Basically, a user will be able to click on a word, and hear it spoken by and English man. This will help English learners to pronounce the words correctly, although they might end up all speaking like a certain bloke. But recording 6,600 words is not something we have done before at Netring. For this we called local company, Dreamworld Studio. Jens, at Dreamworld has been a great help, and he really knows how to do his job well. All in all, the recording took 1 day (thats recording over 6000 words), and editing about 3 days. Thank you Dreamworld.

GwasgGwennan.com

Gwasg Gwennan is actually the company behind the Engvocab.com vocabulary. Ceri Jones from Gwasg Gwennan wrote the vocabulary and his Gwasg Gwennan are publishing it sometime this summer. When we got the work for Engvocab.com, we also got the much smaller project of building a small, static website for www.gwasggwennan.com. Like Engvocab.com, this site is also multi-lingual, but unlike it, it is a static website, with a straight translation of every page, which made it much easier to construct.

Finally, after a very long haul, between projects and in overtime, the company website has been brought up to standards, and more.

Netring Media and Technology

The Innocent Statement has been quite for the last few months, and this is one (just one) of the reasons why. However, I think that it has been worth it. I am quite happy with the site, it is a whole lot better than the last one we had. It has been developed in such a way that makes it easier to update, and we have more plans to extend it in the future.

Over the next few weeks I will try to take some time out to talk about the development of the site. I hope to get the chance to talk about the way it works on the front-end and the backend. But for now, you will just have to be happy with looking at it! I hope you like it.

Some of you may remember, back in May, I was working on a project in Swansea council, for the Safer Swansea partnership.

Safer Swansea

Well, I left Swansea council to join the Netring team, and at the point of leaving I had finished all the CSS, XHTML and Graphics for the site. When I realised that I was going to have to leave before the content was put in place (edit: actually, about half of the content was in place by the time I left), I gave a colleague strict instructions on how to update the site content. I even gave them a 'template' to work off. I can get a bit too proud of my work sometimes!

In hindsight, I realise that I didn't think of everything. Not in the least important is that I didn't leave them with any CSS to style a form.

I was really worried that this site would become non-standards compliant when I left it in someone else's hands, but to my surprise it hasn't gone too bad. A form on one page is a bit of a mess, and a new link that they have added to the navigation hasn't got an access key like all the rest. Apart from that I am still quite happy with the way the site turned out.

If I was to dig deeper I would probably want to change quite a few things, partly because I have learnt new things since I did that work. Such is life as a web developer.

Anyway, check it out, and post a comment if you wish.

This is just a short entry, because that is all I have time for at the moment. I am working on something for the end of this week, maybe the beginning of next week.

After working on various different projects, of all different kinds, something has finally reached the finishing point. Ultima Cleaning is probably the first site to meet web standards properly to leave the cabin, but will not the last by a long way. The design is not beautiful, but that was out of my hands. I do think that it grows on you as you are using the site, and that it suits the company quite well.

As I said, this will hopefully be the first of many CSS based sites coming out of Netring, and the next one is already pretty much in the bag. I quite like the design of the next one also. You may recognise the design from last week; keep an eye on it as the finishing touches are added.

Update: The Glanrhyd-y-Pysgod web site is now live, and pretty much complete. Even if you don't want to go on a fishing holiday in wales, I hope you like the site.