Finishing the Job

Today, We have completed our project. Over the past week and a half we have completed our final presentation, and uploaded a video recording here on the About Our Project Page, Complete our Final Report, and appended a completed version of the Website Manual to the Appendix. The full PDF file can be found in documentation along with a video tutorial of how the website functions and how to operate the editor.

All in all this has been a very successful project. With only three people we managed to set up a functional destination website with the ability to grow and expand as the destination does. Our collaborators seem thrilled with what we presented to them and are excited to dive in and start using the editor. We feel as though we have poured our hearts and souls into this project and we hope that it will meet the destinations online needs for years to come.

Taking Form

As of writing this, we have almost completed populating the website with all of the information that our collaborators have requested we include. We’re not completely happy with the aesthetics yet, but we hope to improve that over the next week with the guidance of the collaborators. We also have not implemented all of the features, and some of the additional things that they have requested over the past week, and plan to work on that next week. One of these tasks is to follow an “Amazon model” and have related links at the bottom of many pages. For example, when looking at an accommodation on the website, there would be images and links at the bottom showing other things in the same area, including other accommodations, attractions, restaurants and businesses. The goal of this is to encourage users to explore the website more and learn about more things. While we have not implemented this yet, we have determined how this would be accomplished and created a “model” on one of the pages.

We also switched the primary language of the website to Romanian, after discussing this option with our collaborator. For areas of the website that are static, Wix allows editors to automatically translate text boxes using Google Translate for the secondary languages. By switching the website to Romanian, this will allow our Romanian counterparts to create new content in Romanian, and use Google Translate to easily translate then verify the content in different languages. As we did this, we made all of the static content multilingual, with both a Romanian and English version available. Additionally, we implemented multilingual capability on dynamic pages. While Wix doesn’t have support for multilingual in databases, we were able to easily code this into these pages using Wix’s Corvid API, which checks which language the user has selected and fills text boxes with the appropriate material. While this requires both languages to be available in the database, it made for an elegant solution to the gap in multilingual support.

We have also finished making the filters on the events page work. These allow users to put in any combination of event type, start date, and end date, and filter the list of events. This will make it easier for users to identify events relevant to them. We will also be adding location filtering next week to improve this system. Over the next week, we plan to finish the website with the additional features and improve it based on any feedback we receive from our collaborators.

Rockin’ and Rollin’

With a generally clear plan of how we will accomplish our goals for the website, we have significantly ramped up our work adding the necessary content and features. The primary feature we have added is an events display, which shows the events stored in the database in a list, and can be filtered based on type of event and date. Currently, we do not have it working so that the different filters can be used at the same time - that is, you can only filter by date or by type - but we hope to get that working soon. We also do not have the capability to filter by location. We hope to be able to allow the user to enter an address and find events within some radius of that location, but to do this we need to use a map API which will calculate the distance between the events and the location. While Google Maps is the most common API for this application, it has a pricing model which could cause our collaborator to be charged a significant amount if the website usage became too great. We have been looking for other free open source APIs we could use as a substitute to make sure that the website is scalable and that increased traffic wouldn’t result in large costs for the collaborator. If we are not able to find such a solution, our fall-back plan is to have a pull-down of towns to filter with.

With all of the pages created, we have also begun populating content on the website. This is taking rather longer than we expected, as we are implementing a significant amount of the content in what Wix calls “dynamic pages.” Dynamic pages include a template, and a database of information. The template is connected to the database so that for each row in the database a page is created based on the template. This allows us to ensure consistency between pages of the same type (for example, the pages for each protected area), and should make it easier to add different items in a set in the future for our collaborators. We have run into a couple of issues with this, however, including the lack of multilingual support in Wix’s databases. In most parts of the website, text boxes can just be translated for each language version, but since this is not the case for databases, creating a multilingual site is a little more tricky. Our plan is to create columns for different languages for each text property in the database, and then modify code using Wix’s corvid tool so that the correct columns are used to populate the dynamic pages for each language. While this does complicate the website slightly, we hope that the dynamic pages will still have a speed advantage over creating individual pages for each item in a set. We are hoping to have all of these issues resolved by early next week, so that we can continue tackling our ambitious plans, in hopes of creating a very helpful website for the Transylvanian Highlands.