crazybobbles

Today I managed to approach Jonathan Briggs, a very successful person in the whole CMS/ecommerce side (joint owner of a company called www.othermedia.com) I showed him three ideas that I was hoping to do for my final year project, they included:

Idea 1
My brother, for his final year project, produced a website for a guitar company called Petercooks.co.uk which enabled his clients to add/edit/delete products on the site. However I believe the site could do better in terms of attracting customers through site optimisation (Google optimised), design reworking, providing additional features such as such, related products and populIdea 1

My brother, for his final year project, produced a website for a guitar company called Petercooks.co.uk which enabled his clients to add/edit/delete products on the site. However I believe the site could do better in terms of attracting customers through site optimisation (Google optimised), design reworking, providing additional features such as such, related products and popular products tables, and including a shopping cart for the site (though once you checkout, the rest will simply become manual as the customer requested that they’d like things to be done manually).

The problem however would be that I would be using the same client as my brother and might turn into a plagiarism issue. I am very keen on producing a site like this but not too keen in attending sessions regarding my work being an act of plagiarism.

Idea 2
My second idea would be to revamp one of my sites that I worked on for my multimedia module. The site was a fan site for the band “Muse” and included a gallery, message board, and place for people to view my covers of the band. However, the site feels like it could be improved, not only by the design, but by features such as allowing users to upload their covers, creating a more integrated gallery for users to upload their photos and so on. The problem with this idea is that the project lacks a client. There isn’t a person responsible in the community which makes it hard for me to produce a site out of a client’s requirements and specifications. The idea was considered mainly because it would be one of those projects that I would be highly motivated in producing (as it was my site).

Idea 3
My final idea (which seems like the most practical one). Was suggested by a lecturer at Kingston University, I was approached by a lecturer (Andrew Lenaghan) who suggested a project for me to do. It was to port a Network and Communications (ncg.kingston.ac.uk) site into a CMS type site. He is very open to what features could be added onto the site and was willing to match his requirements to something I was able and happy to produce.

Here is a quote of what he wanted me to do

“You have the gist of what we are looking to achieve - that of porting the existing content from the NCG site into a CMS but we would look to beyond just porting into exploring what potential some of the new web type technologies/services might offer - calendars, document repositories, message board, blogs, etc. We do have some particular “workflow” type issues for preparing documents for publication and coordinating research (ie project management)

The project could be framed in a couple of different ways - I would want to get enough ’substance’ into it to make it technically challenging for the developer as well as useful to the group.

We half have a CMS in mind (dotnetnuke) but we could potentially consider other CMS’s (I like jamoola myself) - ie it could be a project about assessing and selecting CMS’s, or we could make that decision fairly quickly and focus on the services a CMS could deliver, or even the networking (load balancing / robustness).

So is there a bottom line in terms of delivering a working site but we are pretty open get into some negotiations about taking the work in a direction that would interest you as well. (A good project should let you show some initiative and not just routinely meet a set of requirement).”

As its quite flexible I would like to explore on the idea of producing the whole CMS system from scratch rather then taking shortcuts.

Jonathan went through all 3 ideas and said gave me very productive criticisms about them. Idea one was simply a no no, the idea that it stems from my brothers project makes it a definite no no (not to mention how its rather boring these days). Idea two he liked the most out of the 3, it seemed like the one I could really expand out of. He recommended technologies such as XML and AJAX to use to promote the band. He also said that the main client would probably be Muse (though contacting them isn’t the easiest thing to do). The third idea was simply far too boring. He told me that it wasn’t much of an interesting project, it was too boring and the client really isn’t a client, its kind of a reject project if you think about it.
So yeah, he is hoping to contact some people at his company to explore ideas for me to use as projects. He has also kindly agreed for being my supervisor for the project. This means the hard part is sorted. (kinda)