Jun 15, 2010
The target audience for this project will be “gamers,” mainly males between the ages of 16-30. A gamer is someone who plays video games, as quoted from “Historically, the term “gamer” usually referred to someone who played role-playing games and war games. More recently, the term has grown to include players of video games. While the term nominally includes those who do not necessarily consider themselves to be gamers (i.e., casual gamers), [1] it is commonly used to identify those who spend much of their leisure time playing or learning about different games.” My target is both causally and hardcore (committed) and anyone in between, my main target is the type of person who plays multi-player games online. I am targeting this type of gamer because the project will be based on a social network, and hopefully something like a meeting place where gamers can find each other.
The websites content will be coming almost entirely from its users, I will be creating a platform so the key users may blog and share news or give reviews about games they have played, and there will be a sub-blog where the average user can share reviews and news to the community as well. In this sense the website will continually grow as content is added by all of its members, so there is no set amount of content.
The website will be have five static web pages; home, activity, members, groups, and forums, these five pages are all for the social network aspect of the site. The site will also use categories for the blog posts, and the web site will automatically create new pages to house the content as categories are created. Because this website is so dynamic nothing can be set in stone.
The challenges I can foresee is issues with security, since this website will be housing massive amounts of information I must make sure it can not be hacked or broken. Also I see a problem creating the standard users blog and must find a way to make it work.
Jun 15, 2010
Flow Chart
The site will have to be user friend as the user will be the one to enter the content, I have devised several methods for the site to be automated when content is added, for example if an image or image gallery is added light box will be applied to the images. Another issue I needed to solve was keeping options like changing the post category and comment control off for lower member levels, for this problem I just hid the options.
The content is automatically organized by it’s category, and the container is extremely flexible to fit any size of content as far as height, if an object is wider than the content area light box will be employed to display the content fully.
Jun 15, 2010
The navigation design will mainly focus on the social network aspect of the site, the main focus of the home page may be on video game news and article, but at its core this site is about social networking. This main navigation will be placed at the top of the page and be accompanied by a search bar. The links in this navigation will be; home, activity, members, groups, and forums.
The secondary navigation will be placed on the side bar; this navigation will not have a set height, because it will be filled dynamically based on categories. The user will have control over the categories and can create new categories freely. The categories can have sub-categories and the navigation will reflect that.
The website will use Wordpress as its platform with the Buddypress plug-in, Buddypress will give the use of many social network features. With Buddypress, users will be able to interact with each other and create their own personal space on the web page.
Since the content is almost all user generated, a numeric naming convention is used to keep file names clean and uniform, this will also keep permalinks “pretty”. The user will still be able to choose the posts or files title. The websites directory structure is mainly based on categories and sub-categories, and is very fluid.
- May 11 – Start learning Buddypress, and have an understanding by the 18th.
- May 18 – Install Wordpress and Buddypress fresh, decided on features to use.
- May 25 – Design informational (back end) structure, and design content (front end) structure.
- June 1 – Create graphical skin and apply.
- June 8 – User testing, and fix problems and tweak minor design elements.
- June 15 – Enter beta, allow user registration and entry of new content from users.
