Fully functional site available at – www.weareukmma.co.uk
Evaluation
As part of my Network Aesthetics module, I had to design and create a ‘collaborative’ website based around a subject of my choice. The only real criteria for the site, was that it had to be ‘collaborative’, meaning the content would have to be primarily user driven.
Even though the website was first and foremost a uni project, we were encouraged to create a site that could live beyond the assignment and stay active as a genuine website.
Based on it’s recent growth in popularity, my original idea was to create a site around the indie game Minecraft, primarily allowing users to create custom skins/clothes for their in-game character, that then could then export and use. This was however a seemingly very popular idea and would mean a fair bit of competition from various other well established sites already out there.
The second idea was to create a site similar to that of MTV’s scarred, where users could upload and share their own/others injuries sustained on camera. The site would allow users to rate or favourite other injuries and would even feature categories such as injuries of the month etc. Again the site would face a fair amount of competition from pre-existing sites of the same nature and would probably end up being too hard for one person to moderate/check all the videos and pictures were of a suitable nature.
This left me with my third and final idea, one that was originally mentioned to me by a friend some months ago. As Mixed Martial Arts (or MMA as it’s frequently shortened to), has now taken top spot for the fastest growing sport in the world, there was a giant gap in a very niche market, I could exploit. Primarily based in the US, MMA fever has reached UK shores and began to sweep the nation with no one real hub or specific source of primarily UK based news for followers of the sport. It’s that hole that I could fill, by collating all the news from social media and other sites, we could become the number one site focusing solely on reporting on the UK scene.
Due to the nature and content of the site, It was easy to make it collaborative as users opinions and interactions are such a vital part of keeping the site ticking over. Although the site predominantly fronts as a news source, the structure allows users to interact with us and one another seamlessly, through the use of comments and community forums.
As soon as I had a basic plan and direction for the site decided, I could begin to actually create it. Using the tools and skills I had learnt in class, I registered a domain with TSO Host and installed the WordPress application, creating the basic site. As there were a few US equivalent sites, I found and installed several WordPress themes online similar to the ones they were using and began to tailor it to my sites own needs. Once it was roughly set out, with a menu system and the CSS sorted, I sought to creating the forum page that would act as my main ‘collaborative’ feature. Thankfully, I found the plugin PunBB and was easily able to install and set-up the forum without too much re-coding needed. This then lead me onto the wordpress plugin marketplace, where I stumbled across several different addons I was also able to easily incorporate and better my site with.
Surprisingly, this made creating the rest of the site very simple and actually left me a lot of time I had allocated to building and coding, to really test it and make sure that when it was time to submit, I had a completely functional and ready to launch site.
Of course, it wasn’t going to be without it’s bugs and luckily I had two friends to thoroughly test the site and weed out any problems that arose. Usually a quick google would solve the problem and lead me to a particular settings page where it was a case of ticking or unticking a box etc but on more than one occasion I was forced to go away and find/create a custom bit of code to fix whatever seemingly unique problem I had encountered. Thankfully on every occurrence of this, I managed to rectify the problem, even if it meant a few hours of head-scratching first.
Upon reflection, having now made this site, I would almost definitely do it entirely different a second time around. I completely over-estimated how hard it would be to create an entire site, previous to my knowledge of plugins and other such tools that save a mountain of time when coding. I would spend a lot longer making sure the theme I picked actually fit the purpose of my site, in-terms of functionality rather than its flashy appearance, as I found the latter to be a lot easier to change. I would also feel way more confident in troubleshooting problems that would arise and would check to fix a lot of these before it came into fruition. Overall the module has greatly improved my web design skills and I now feel more than confident to go away and create a handful more.