- Guestbook (or Message Board)
- Forum
- News/events System
- Classified Ads System
- User Authentication System
- Contact us
Here, what have to be point out is that the functionalities provided by linking to another website will not be examined. We only study and analyse the functionality offered in the website itself.
The table below examines the implementation methods of those functionalities used in the four local community websites:
The following passages will analyse the design and iplementaiton method of above functionalities in the four websites in detail.
Guestbook (or Message Board)
Guestbook provides a virtual notebook for web visitors to leave some message on the web, it is a basic method to interact between visitors and website and provide the visitors opportunities to participate. All messages are displayed instantly after visitors submit it.
Usually, guestbook is implemented in a dynamic way. When a new message is submitted, it will be sent to the server and stored in the database, and when the webpage listing the messages in guest book is requested, the server will retrieve from the database some messages on top according to the time and date order, use it to create a webpage and send them to the browser.
In the four websites, Peterborough and Costar-Cwmbran provide guestbook on their websites and they are quite similar. Both of them require the guests to register or log in first before writing messages that effectively limits the misuse of the guestbook. All messages are displayed in time and date order and there are no search function provided.
Properly, you may think if a searching engine were provided, it would be better. However, in guest book the content of messages is casual, or not very important, and message structure is quite simple, so providing an searching engine here is a little waste.
Forum
Forum is similar to the guest book, the difference is that the forum organizes the messages in a hierarchy way. The relevant messages are organized in a topic, similar topics are organized in a theme, and similar themes can be in one larger classification. In doing so, it can provide different topics and themes for guests to choose to participate in. They can leave messages, reply messages, discuss issues, exchange opinions and make friends here. Compared with the static website which only provide static information, forum is a typical dynamic functionality endows the visitor a feeling of involvement, and make the virtual community more like the real one.
The implementation of forum is also very similar to the guest book. However, if guestbook still have a chance to store data in a text file, the forum has to use a database to maintain all the messages because of the much more amount and the hierarchical structure of data.
A lot of community websites provide forum in their virtual community. In our four websites, Peterborough and South-Yorks have their own forum which are also quite similar to each other and to other website I have visited. Particularly, Peterborough provides a private space named PNet for registered visitors to send and receive their private messages.
News/Events System
All of the four website provides this kind of system, but each of them has their own characteristics.
In Costar this system is called Newsletter and Archives. It provides news and events in form of newsletters that is not up-to-date. Blacksburg’s provide the similar system named Calendar/News. It can be seen that here news/ events are updated fairly frequently. In addition to local news and events, Peterborough and South-Yorks provide UK or even worldwide news. The former offers extremely wealthy and fresh news, the latter updates its news automatically several times a day.
All of them reserve that past news/events in their website, but if people want to past news/events, in Costar the only thing they can do is to click the newsletters links and browse the past issues one by one. Blacksurg provides them in a friendly interface, which is called “calendar table”. Readers can quickly find their interested event by choose the day on the calendar table and click the relevant links. It also provides two drop-down menus for viewers to choose month and year and locate quickly. Therefore although this website stores 3 years events on the web server, readers can quickly locate the event they are interested within a few seconds. Peterborough similarly provide a dropdown menu to help find past events by month and year.
If visitors have their own news /events to publish, in the first three websites emails links or forms are offered for doing this. However the South-Yorks endows the visitors power of posting their own news/events themselves through complete a form without any preview or approval.
We can summarize the news / events system in the following table:
It is obvious that the first website does poorly in providing fresh news/events. It is static with use of HTML and has no difference from a printed newsletter. The static nature of webpage leads to the static and out-of-date news. If the editor want to change some context he has to write and upload a new webpage, which also limits the amount of the news/events a website can provides. In addition, every news is a fix and separate webpage with no relationship to each other. Therefore, locating news becomes so difficult.
The rest three all using dynamic techniques in offering news/events. Every page is dynamically generated with the use the database, the websites can easily store a huge number of news or events and retrieve the past news/events quickly. Dynamic web pages greatly decrease the editor’s workload and make the frequent news updating possible. [2] With writing some asp or php codes, the news can even be updated automatically from the news source links or from the views’ submission.
However, the benefits of dynamic technical really depend on the different situation. Peterborough takes the most use of the dynamic benefits, it updates the news automatically from news source of other websites and even give the viewers power to update the news/events themselves. It is a little radical, because everyone can post any content on the event page! At least it should have a registration system to limit the power to the registered guests. In this point, South-York is moderate, it permit automatical news updating but reserve the right to preview the events before they are posted on the web. Blacksburg is rather conservative, it neither provides news from other new websites, nor update all the local news , and events itself. It is understandable, because maybe a local website should focus on the local news and event, it is not necessary to provide news from all over the world.
User Authentication System
User authentication system is essential to a local website, especially to these with some dynamic functionalities like forum, guestbook, news updating and so forth. It is also necessary in providing services to specific people. It makes it possible to provide different service to different people.
When the webpage viewers log in, their input of username and password are send to the web server, the web server verifies the username and its password, if everything is OK, accept the request, if not, return a page to say such things as “sorry, you are not a valid user”. In a very simple website, maybe there are only several user accounts and password that can be stored in a text file or just embed them into the condition sentences in scripts. However with the increase the registered users, looking into the text file makes the retrieving process slower and unbearable, once again a database must be introduced in to manage the user account and provide quick retrieving. In a small local community website, no matter how simple it is, the latent users will be all of the local residents. Therefore I believe in all of the four websites, database is used in maintaining the data of user account and password.
In all of the four websites, user authentication system is offered.
South-Yorks needs registration in forum, Costar-Cwmbran in guestbook. However, Peterborough needs separate registration respectively in forum and classified ads. The guests have to register and log in twice even within the same website. The Blacksburg takes a better form. It requires the guest to register as a villager in the e-Community first and after log in, a registered e-Community villager can enjoy every service and any power provided in e-Community. In addition to make the visitor feel as if in the real community, this way provide a centralized user account management and simplifies the log-in procedures for visitors as well as the user’s database behind. This method is very effective especially in a website offering many items of services or dynamic functionalities that need registered identification.
Classified Ads System
Three website provide classified ads system to encourage visitors put their own ads on the website.
The table below describes the function provided in the Classified Ads in the three websites:
Both Peterborough and Blacksburg need proper username and password. In South-York website, as it is said in the web page “placing an ad is free and simple”. It does need any username or password, any person can post an ad on the classified ads.
Instant Post is available in South-York and Blacksburg. In contrast, in Peterborough, ads need to be viewed before appearing on the webpage.
All the three classified ads systems hold quite huge data of ads and provide website visitors with searching function in addition to the clearly classified display.
Generally speaking, the design of Peterborough in classified ads system is the best. It effectively improves the quality of the ads and provides the ads posters with full control of their own ads.
Contact Us
Contact Us offers a communicating way between website editor or developer and web visitors. Visitors can ask questions, give some suggestions or inform the web master of a wrong link through Contact Us.
Three websites have such functionality. Peterborough achieves it by some email links, the information from the visitors will be directly sent to the web developers email box, which we call static way. Costar-Cwmbran and South-Yorks provide a form for views to fill in and then click submit button, the form will be sent and stored in the database on the server. We call this way dynamic way. Static way is good at informing the editors of the information in time; Dynamic way is prominent in the management of the information that is usually stored in a database. If there is not too much contact-us information from the viewer, the static way will be preferable, for it is simple and quick.
Conclusion
From the analysis above on the four local community websites, I reach the conclusions as following:
- Implementing local community website in a dynamic way can bring a lot of advantages:
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With dynamic functionalities like guest book and forum, the website endows the viewers the feeling of participation, makes communication easier and instant, both of which are very important to a local community website. [2]And this interactivity is absolutely impossible in static website.
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With the use of database, the dynamic website has the ability to provide large amount of information that will be clearly displayed, quickly retrieved and well managed. [2] The good examples are past news/events, classified ads, forum topics, user account and so on.
Dynamic web pages are generated every time based on a pre-defined template with the data retrieved from database, therefore it is to keep content fresh and greatly decreases the workload of website developers. [2]
- However, we could not abuse the dynamic advantages. A website developer can create a website with all its content maintained and updated by the web visitors themselves, if he wants. But the web page will go out of control. South-Yorks is a typical too dynamic website that gives too much power like instant ads and news/events posting to visitors. Furthermore Dynamic is not always suitable. In some simple functionality such as Contact Us, it does not seem necessary to use the database and dynamic implementation.
- After above analysis, the following is reached as my preferable design for a local community website:
Reference
1. http://www.egr.msu.edu/classes/ece482/Teams/98spr/design1/web/dt1-pro1.htm
2. http://www.slicksurface.com/showcase/dynamicweb/why.php
3. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jfulton/php1/static-dynamic.html
