This website was the first website that actually went out on the web, The site it was taking over was a old website using only HTML to display content, and content became out of date very quickly. The idea of this website was to allow information to be collected from central flat file databases, due to the absence of SQL or other database hosting. At this point I was only just beginning to learn PHP and the whole of the customer site was built using HTML and javascript, javascript being the language making the page dynamic. The scripts would process query strings off the address and do the necessary actions on certain pages, however as it has become clear now it is actually not the best of sites as there is no server scripts and people not having browsers that support javascript (of which there are not many) could not view many of the important pages such as prices, activity details and other information. As the old website used frames to my naivety I thought this was the way to go, and rather than having a new frameset for each page, as before, I created one frameset for the whole website with a meta refresh, automatically refreshing the content into the main page after a period of 5 seconds. This of course looses some of the more impatient visitors (of which you can see a couple off the webserver log) and also made search engines hate you. The likes of google could not pick up much of the information and trouble with client screen size are blatantly apparent through the screen shots attached. The site was a mess in the way of code, compatibility and accessibility. It needed a makeover. One of my more major aims was to make the code W3C compliant to the XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 1.0 standards, which was successfully achieved on all pages before launch.
The other half of the website was an instructor system that was made to use flat file databases to store sessions and display them on a page without the need for an HTML editor, without changing the XHTML standard on the page. This became my first PHP script, using objects to keep track of sessions. It worked by the simple upload of a CSV upload from a spreadsheet program, such as Excel of OpenOffice, converted initials of instructors to full names via a PHP array held separately to create a new, processed CSV file and RSS feed of all the sessions. That could be uploaded or read in a simple PHP script For the expertise of the users using it this was a system that was easy to use and covered all the specifications provided.
The main idea of the current website was to clean up some of the bad navigation, implement a template and ensure that staff could update content easily. As well as this online bookings can be made and all details are stored in a database so that in the future the system could be extended to allow repeat bookings, but at the moment it allows statistics to be created.
This website has now been handed over to the staff at the facility to continue updating, however if there are ever any issues I step in to help them.
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