1 / 8

Jean-Paul Rodrigue Dept. of Economics & Geography Hofstra University Hempstead, NY

Transport Geography on the Web: Practical Implications for Developing, Maintaining and Upgrading a Large Educational Web Site. Jean-Paul Rodrigue Dept. of Economics & Geography Hofstra University Hempstead, NY Jean-paul.Rodrigue@hofstra.edu. The Project. Transport Geography on the Web

magee
Download Presentation

Jean-Paul Rodrigue Dept. of Economics & Geography Hofstra University Hempstead, NY

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Transport Geography on the Web:Practical Implications for Developing, Maintaining and Upgrading a Large Educational Web Site Jean-Paul Rodrigue Dept. of Economics & Geography Hofstra University Hempstead, NY Jean-paul.Rodrigue@hofstra.edu

  2. The Project • Transport Geography on the Web • Started in 1997 from a grant by Industry Canada. • TG course supported by a web site. • Canadian initiative for the development of the information highway (provide relevant content). • Team of 4 transport geographers. • 6th year of development. • One of the longest continuously maintained academic content site available. • http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans

  3. The Project • Current status • About 2,800 files: • 1750 HMTL, PPT, XLS and ZIP files. • 1050 GIF and JPG images. • 40 MB. • PowerPoint slides: • About 780 slides. • Search engines: • 2nd in Google for “transport geography”. • All pages have been indexed; “occupies the real estate”. • Commonly turn out on the top 10 links on related searches: • (1st) “transport graph theory”; (2nd) “geography transport network”; (8th) “air transport geography”. • Main reference in about 10 transport geography classes.

  4. Structure • Table of contents, index, media and credits. • Topical division • 9 chapters, each related to a major field of the discipline. • Each chapter supported by an array of PowerPoint slides, Excel worksheets and GIS-T datasets. • Thematic division • Each topic divided in concepts, methods and applications. Home TOC Index Chapter 1 Glossary Chapter 2 Media … Chapter 9 Credits Concepts Methods Applications

  5. Design Issues • Wed design • Significant changes reflecting the evolution of web design and site management. • Very important for large sites. • Includes the appearance, navigation and organization: • Choice and consistency of fonts, positioning and colors. • Large web sites require a complex organization and storage structure. • Navigation must be easy and intuitive. • Collaborative work: • An agreed upon design and interface. • Either provide a template or a strategy to include and upgrade the material. • A site is dynamic (modifications and upgrades are constant).

  6. Design Issues • First version design • Frame based: • Difficult to be indexed by search engines. • A query on Google would end up in a page without links. • Graphic buttons and titles: • Loading problems (especially “onmouseover”) • Table layout: • <TR> and <TD> mess. • Pesky <FONT> tags. • Very difficult to maintain: • Some inconsistency between pages. • A simple change in the design involved modifying manually hundreds of pages.

  7. Design Issues • Major upgrade in Spring 2002 • CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): • Consistency in format (applicable to the whole site). • Powerful text formatting. • HTML + CSS = 30-40% reduction in file size. • Separate design for onscreen and printing. • Easy to change design. • <DIV> based layout (more flexible positioning). • Jscript slide menu: • Minimal impact on valuable screen “real estate”. • Popup windows: • Improve the document’s continuity. • Automatically close. • Navigation bar (excellent orientation tool).

  8. Future Directions • Extend the content • Struggle to keep the contents up-to-date. • Develop exercises and labs (GIS-T datasets). • Search capabilities within the site (with relevance ranking). • Improve the media • Reliance on SVG (scalable vector graphic). • Multimedia contents (clips, animations and narrations). • Improve search engine indexation • <meta> tagging efficiently the whole contents. • Several pages should get a better ranking. • Lifetime initiative

More Related