A word from the site manager
Following the increase in possibilities for WEB page design, professional
support was sought by the literary program "Lire les femmes africaines" in
order to make the information offered on the site more interactive and user
friendly. The information provided below has been prepared by our web page
consultant. It summarizes the steps taken to improve the site
at the end of 1997 and early in 1998. You may find the specific issues
addressed interesting
in working on your own site. Please do not hesitate to let us know what you
think.
jmv
A word from the web page consultant
The following are some of the changes I suggested and implemented:
1. Making better use of existing (HTML generated) features:
Inclusion of frames to allow some
information (such as the content) to remain constant while other is being
browsed. This example is from the electronic journal "Mots Pluriels", which is
loosely related to the project and whose site has also been improved by
the inclusion of frames.
Use of maps whereby one or more hot
spots are defined by coordinates anywhere on an image. In this
example
, the photograph is defined as a map, and each of the authors' face has
a coordinate that defines a hot spot.
Inclusion of sound is in progress in
order to give an African feel to the site. Short
samples of writers' voices (being interviewed, reading their
works, etc) and music are being added.
Better setup of tables has been
achieved, using borderwidth, cellwidth, cellpadding and background (only
available in Netscape 4) or background color within each cell. example
An essential part of any interactive web page is provided by forms, allowing the webmaster to receive visitors feedback on the site as well as specific suggestions. The form in this example allows visitors to suggest the inclusion of new titles in African literature.
3. Use of Javascript in particular to create:
A guided tour Due to
its growing size, a guided tour was included to introduce new visitors to
the important sections of this site. This guided tour is flexible as it can
be viewed automatically or at the visitor's own pace.
example
Validation of forms In order to prevent a form being sent a
validation process has been set in place without essential information
(such as the name of the book in the suggestions for the bibliography!) For
an example try sending in
this form without filling in the comment box.
So called "rollover" effect This special effect has endless
applications and certainly spices up a page. As an example, in this site,
it was used to display an author's name when the mouse is passed over their
photo in the Who is Who? section. example
Pop up
windowsThese were used here to generate the forms as a "side page",
allowing the user to get directly back to the page they were browsing after
submitting the form information. The suggestion form and all of the
examples on this page use pop up windows!
A slide show gallery Using frames, a visitor can peruse the artists
paintings (changing automatically) while reading interesting information
about the artist.
A search index is an indispensable feature of any large site such as this one, where hundreds of authors, books, articles and other information are referenced. example
January 1998