Ecotastic
|
ABOUT THIS SITEClick on the link you want to go to. Why did we create this site When did we start the site How did we create this site Future Improvements Problems we overcame
So why did we create this website? The Hagbourne School web team created this website to help other schools and people at home to be more eco friendly. We want to share all our eco experiences with others, so the world will be a much happier place for us all to live in. Hagbourne Primary School is Oxfordshire's only Ecoschool and felt we should be encouraging other schools by sharing our experiences. We work really hard to keep our flag and we hope that other schools will want to get an eco flag too. This website is full of pictures and advice to be more eco friendly. We hope that after you have seen the website you will think twice about what you throw away, and how much energy you use. We started this site in January 2003. We will keep updating the web with our latest achievements. How did we create this website? Our internet team got together once a week to do this site. We used Front page 2000 to do all our work, and then put it on the Internet. We discussed different sections and names of site areas with Mrs Duffy, a class teacher who coordinates eco work, and asked Julia from the Northmoor trust for advice. We agreed on the site name and colour scheme and then each member of team chose an area to research and create. Each person worked on sites separately, then Mrs. Rhodes, a parent and superstar, helped us put it all together as one big site. We decided to have a navigation bar at the top of each page. It loads first, and is quite easy for familiar users with our school site. A pictorial menu looks welcoming and better than just text. We have used consistent icons and groups where it is possible. We thought that green was a very suitable and appropriate colour for Eco, and a fairly plain nature background would still make the writing legible. We used a style sheet and made all pages the same font and size. The hyperlinks we used are purple turning pink after you've been to that page, these colours go well with green. We decided to have the same page transitions and background throughout the site, but team members choose their own dynamic html effects. We kept different parts of the web in separate folders, so it was easier to work on, but the pictures we all used are kept in 1 image folder with subfolders for backgrounds. Most of the photos were taken by us on the school digital cameras, these are the Sony Mavica, which stores the pictures on a floppy disk. We edited the pictures using Paint and Microsoft Photo Editor so the file size was smaller and the pages loaded quicker. Most of the clipart came from Microsoft clipart online and some we searched for in Google. We edited animated pictures, making the butterfly move faster, using Paint Shop Pro. We tried not to have too many html effects as they slow page down. We used Windows Sound Recorder to record and edit our sound files and a program called Hot potato to make the quizzes. We copied java script from http://www.dynamicdrive.com/ to get a 'print button' and other special effects like moving butterflies and mouse trails. We decided to include a facility for feedback from visitors to our new website. We also asked parents, governors and staff to visit the site and give us feedback. The contents page could be better. We used the one that came with Front page, but that also gives you links to all the sound files, which you don't really need. We will keep on adding more information to all areas of our site and try to add more hyperlinks to other sites. The quizzes are easy to create and we would like to add different sorts of quizzes or a crossword puzzle. We will link this site to our main school web site and hopefully get schools to take part in our Eco challenge. We need to make our site work fully with Netscape, this means replacing the Front page dynamic html effects as soon as we have time. When we first published the web site it had lots of broken links. We found that all the broken links were to files with capital letters, after we completely renamed all the files with capital to small letters. After this we tested the 'search' and it was still finding the links to pages starting with capital letters (which were not there). In the end we deleted the whole site off the web and published it again! Everything now worked! We have tested our site on Internet Explorer 5 and 6 and Netscape 7. In Netscape 7 one of the mouse trails doesn't work and none of the Front page dynamic html effects work, in fact the page titles disappear completely, so we removed a lot of these HTML effects. We have not been about to test our site on other versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape because we haven't got them at school or home. We need to find friends with different versions to test them for us. Our aim was to finish the site before our SAT's tests and to do this we had to work really hard. We had to fit in lots of lunch time and after school sessions, and even do some work at home to get the site finished. Page created by The Web Team. May 2003.
|