How to prepare to interview your Web design client

Web Client Interview Form

Turkish American Cultural Society of RI

Atlantic RI (GoFaucet.com) on its own domain

International Business Development Association (IMDA) (visible soon)

St. Pierre’s Shoes (visible soon)

One of these sites has already gone live under its own domain and the others will be ported to their respective domains soon. Congratulations to all for a job well done, I am proud of your work and so should you be.

[Show as slideshow]

I hope all is going well.  I was a student in your class back in 2004 (Marketing on the Internet).  I went through the motions of the course but didn’t really fully understand or apply the course to the real world.  I didn’t have ambition and lacked motivation.  This was a huge mistake on my part.  The major project of the course was to create a website for an established business.  Our group chose my father’s company – JJ’s Appliance Repair.  We constructed a very well made website but I never registered the website or secured an address for it and the computer I used in College is no longer.

I was wondering if you still had this site saved in the Providence College database, or have a draft of it saved in your files.  If you do not have this I plan to create a website from scratch for my father’s business.  I realize now that the Internet is an integral piece of marketing/advertising your business properly and am seeking to help my father achieve this goal for his business.  I need to make up for what I already had at my fingertips.

Please let me know if you can help.

Sincerely,

Joe Student

To which I replied:

I remember you and your father’s business being your project. Good to hear from you, I hope everything is going your way. It is also interesting to hear your hind-sight take on the course. If you do not mind, I would like to share your message with my students this semester, I will suppress your name.

I do not have a copy of your Web site. However, in those days you kept your projects on the StudentWeb server and with some amount of luck you may be able to find it. First, remember whether it was saved under your account or one of your team mates’ account. Then check the studentweb.providence.edu to see if it is still there. It may not be. Then, you may contact the administrator of StudentWeb and see if they have a backup copy that they can resurrect. If none of this works, then you are back on square one.

Starting this semester, I am teaching the course using a freely available blog/CMS (content management system) software called WordPress ( www.wordpress.org ). I suggest that you look into that. It will make your life significantly simpler. My academic and photography Web sites both run on WordPress platform. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of “themes” that allow you to give the look you want and the content is very easy to update. Take a look at my syllabus for MOTI and read the blog section for a couple of entries on WordPress that I posted for my students. There are a couple of recommended books which you may find helpful. If you decide to take on this and try WordPress and occasionally stumble, write to me and I will try to help you out; I still have a chance to make you learn the material, better late than never!

Take care and keep in touch.

Cemal Ekin

A little after sending the above message, I heard from “Joe” who enthusiastically told me to share this story and added:

You can definitely share my message with your students. Out of embarrassment for myself please do suppress my name. I was very naïve in college and definitely took some of my courses and studies for granted. I am doing very well …
…
<snip some text>
…
Here is another story if you would like to use it:

I distinctly remember arguing with you about my grade at the end of the year – I think I received a C or C– or something. I completed all of the coursework and our team received a really good grade on the website and presentation. If you took into account the projects and coursework that I completed and calculated it based strictly on my grades I probably should have ended up with a strong B if not an A-. I was pretty upset to see that I had been given such a low grade. Looking back now, I think the C was gratuitous because you probably should have failed me for being stupid enough not to take the final/easiest step of getting the website on the Internet and taking advantage of the online platform for my father’s business. Looking back on my College career, all I cared about was the grade and not so much learning and understanding the work behind the grade. I guess it’s never too late – I am sure you will be hearing from me about WordPress. Thanks again.

Sincerely,

Joe

I am grateful that “Joe” wrote to me and gave me an opportunity to share his experiences during and after his college years.

Thank you Joe.

Here is the list:

• Firefox, the latest version, get it from its source
• Must-have Firefox add-ons
  • FireBug, excellent debugging tool for HTML and CSS
  • ColorZilla to pick colors from anywhere on the screen, it will provide the HEX code for the color
  • MeasureIt, helps determine the pixel sizes of screen elements and areas
• Useful Firefox add-ons
  • Screen Grab, it will capture the entire screen or the entire document, including the parts that are below the viewport, and save it as an image
  • IE Tab, will run Internet Explorer engine in a Firefox window or tab; useful for quickly looking at a page for IE rendering.
  • ZOTERO, it will make keeping a record of your bibliography notes very easy, along with auto insertion of citations in proper format and automatic creation of bibliographies; this is installed on college lab computers but you may enjoy it more on your own computer (Go to their site after installing it and follow the directions for MS Word Integration)
• Other software
  • Notepad++, a very good all purpose text editor with HTML and CSS savvy
  • FastStone Image Viewer, a very good image viewer and quick editor; it can resize and make simple adjustments
  • TopStyle Lite, an able CSS editor; look for it at the bottom of the page you will visit when you follow the link
  • FileZilla, an FTP client (download the “client” version not the “server”)

You may bring your laptop computer to class if you like, I will use most of these from my notebook computer and show you what they do. They will make your Web development efforts easier, smoother, and less painful (yes! it can be painful!)

1. Login to your domain control panel. You need to point your browser to:

   https://yourdomain.ext:8443

   Not the “s” at the end of http and the trailing :8443

2. You may receive a warning about the certificate not matching the site, ignore that and continue to the site
3. For login ID enter your full domain name, for password use the password I sent to you when I set up your hosting account. You will find yourself at the domain “desktop”
4. Click on “Home” on top of the left column, this will take you to the actual control panel. You should see the following (click to enlarge)
   
5. First, you need to create a MySQL database, so click on the “Databases” icon, then on the following screen “Add new database”
6. The system will suggest a DB name, enter your own, don’t make it too short but keep it under 12 character with no spaces; write down the name that you chose on a piece of paper, you will need that. Make sure that you select from the drop down menu MySQL for the type. Then click on OK to create the DB
7. Now you need to add a DB user for this database with a password. Click on “Add New Database User”. You will need to enter the DB user name and password. Make sure they are not easy to guess or too short (again, make sure not to use more than 12 characters or spaes), you will not need to remember them after the installation. Enter the values into the fields and write them down as you will need them
8. Now, go to http://www.wordpress.org and download the application, it most recent version is 3.0.5 (version 3.1 is around the corner too) and you will see a link to download it on the front page. Save the file to a known location on your local computer
9. Using a ZIP utility, like WinZIP or ZIP Genius, extract the contents of the ZIP file making sure that you create the embedded directory names and contents
10. Locate the wp-config-sample.php file and edit it to reflect the DB name, DB user name, and DB password. There are a couple of other fields that ask you to enter an arbitrary phrase; don’t overlook them. Save it as wp-config.php removing the “-sample” part.
11. Using your FTP client, login to your hosting account, change to httpdocs directory (your Web root), and create a new directory called blog which will be the location of your WordPress installation. Note that there are no uppercase letters in the directory name.
12. After creating the directory, double click on its name to open it; then upload the contents of the WordPress extracted files into it
13. You are almost done, now point your browser to:
    http://www.yourdomain.ext/blog/wp-admin/install.php  and you will see the following screen:
    
14. Enter a blog name, you can change it later, and enter a working email address. Click on Install WordPress. The new versions of WordPress allow you to choose a user name for the site admin. Use a name you will remember but will be difficult for others to guess and do not use spaces or special characters in the name. A mixture of letters and numbers 8-10 characters long will be a good starting point. You will also be asked to create a password, use the guidelines above for that as well
15. WordPress will complete the installation and give you the login screen.
16. Click on “Login” and enter the admin user name you created, paste the password you copied and login. Do not put a check mark in “Remember …” if you are doing this on a public computer.
17. As soon as you login, click on the admin name on the top right corner to edit user information. Scroll down to the end of the page to see “New Password fields, you will need to enter it twice. If you want to change your password to a better one this is te place you will do it. While you are at it, enter your full name into the fields and choose how your name should appear on the posts that you write. Click on Update Profile button
18. Look for the Users on the tool bar on the left, click on it to expand its menu choices. Click on Add New and add a new user. Set this user’s role to “Administrator” as well. You may do the same for all the group members. Make sure you have a division of labor and do not perform the same maintenance functions at the same time. The second user name is an insurance against the main administrator ID and/or password corrupting and not allowing access to the site. In that case, you can use the “spare” admin credentials to login and repair the problems.
19. Congratulations, you now have a working WordPress installation
20. Login to Plesk again if you are not logged in. You need to change the permissions for the applications to use the folders so that you can upload images and other files and install various themes more conveniently.
21. On the domain home, choose “File Manager” and navigate to httpdocs folder where your site is installed in a subfolder called blog (or anything else you might have chosen.
22. When you see the folder where your WordPress installation is click to the lock icon on the right edge of that line to enter security settings. You will see a bunch of “users” that the system recognizes. Look for Plesk IIS User user and IWAM default user if it is there.
23. Click on “Advanced” to bring up the advanced attribute management screen. You will see a long list of attributes. Click on Plesk IIS User line on the top left group, then make sure all three “Files, Subfolders, This Folder” boxes are checked and then add check marks to all but the first and the last two options. See image for detail. DO NOT CLICK OK yet
24. Repeat above for IWAM Plesk default user if you see it.
25. Review your permission settings to save problems later on and revisiting this process. When everything looks fine, click OK to apply these permissions.

Now, applications like WordPress can create folders, add files to them, change them, etc. to maintain your site.

We will then tweak it to do more than the basic installation provides.

Study by objectives

Understand what you are trying to learn before the study session begins. Quickly browse the chapter in five minutes or less to get familiar with the general nature of the material. Then, write on a piece of paper several learning objectives.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

There is no doubt that we will all make a mistake sooner or later. There is a great learning opportunity in what you might otherwise call failure, like receiving a low grade on an exam. Instead, take that as a great opportunity to find out why you received that grade and devise ways to prevent it from happening again. The greatest failure is the failure to learn from mistakes and the worst mistake is the one we repeat.

Assess learning

After you finish studying, refer back to your objectives to assess their achievement. If necessary, go back and review the part that you may have missed. You may save a great deal of time this way since you only have to study what has not clicked yet.

Teach to learn

Teaching is an excellent learning method. Try explaining what you have learned to a willing friend. You will be surprised to see how much more sense the material makes all of a sudden.

Don’t daydream, have fun

Daydreaming is a black-hole that swallows your time. In a contest, leisure wins over study. Don’t let them compete. Spare time for fun. Don’t steal from your study time and feel guilty about it. Have fun after serious studying.

Don’t procrastinate

“Later” is too close to the deadline and the end of the semester is sooner that you think. After procrastinating for a while, the backlog will be so great you will fall into another trap: “there is too much to study, I don’t know where to start.” It is easier to go over little hills than great mountains.

Manage time

One of the most important factors in good class performance is time management. The most likely reason of missed-deadlines is lack of organization. You need to have a system that will let you handle several classes with assignments, upcoming job interviews, personal commitments, and a good dose of “senioritis”. Organize your day, week and the semester to do all that and still have a little time for fun.

Be realistic

Don’t underestimate the time required to complete a project. You feel comfortable when you have the most time at the beginning of the semester and panic when you can least afford it, at the end of the semester. Remember, most projects will take more time than you think.

Set a schedule and stick to it

If you don’t stick to your schedule, time will slip through your fingers. Do things on schedule, not later or tomorrow.

Visit these pages periodically

If you have tips to share, send them to me. I will incorporate them to these pages with due credit to you unless you wish to remain anonymous. Wisdom cannot be told but experiences can be shared to build it.

Organize early and you will be rewarded. Select a team leader who can organize meetings, keep assignments on time, and make the administrative burden much lighter on everyone. Exchange telephone numbers and e-mail addresses with each other and make sure that I have a copy of this information for the entire team.

Schedule standing meetings when everyone will show-up. Allow extra meeting time during the heavy load periods if necessary. Remember, the only people responsible for an efficient team are the team members! If there are minor difficulties in scheduling, assignments, etc., at the beginning, I will be glad to lend a hand to organize the team. I am a member of every team!