Roisin Woolnough reports on a site that aims to be clear and
informative in its health philosophy
Walking is good for you and can even be fun. This is the message
from a Web site that promotes a scheme launched by the Countryside
Agency and the British Heart Foundation last October to get more
people stepping out.
The Walking the Way to Health Initiative (WHI) aims to get 1.5
million inactive people in England back on their feet by
highlighting the health benefits of walking.
It also provides information on walks going on around England
and how each person can work out their own walking schedule.
Web solutions provider SAS Digital created the WHI Web site. For
designer Mark Finning, a major consideration was keeping it clear
and uncluttered.
"Many sites that are produced at this size do tend to be
over-designed. They have so many images that although the final Web
site can look great, the overheads against the download times of
the pages bring into question whether the site is really performing
as quickly as it should at getting to the user what they came for -
the information," Finning says.
Apart from the fact that there was a lot of information to post
up, he says it was relatively easy to keep the technical design
simple because it is not an e-commerce site.
On the design front, Dreamweaver and Photoshop were used for the
initial HTML shell. From there on, it was hand-coded.
It runs on an IIS4 server on a bespoke NT4 box, with a Microsoft
Access database. Again, the database is a straight-forward set-up,
although it does contain a facility termed ICE by SAS Digital.
"The site benefits from having what we call ICE - Internet
collaboration environment - which allows the client to use its own
staff in updating the database-driven areas of the site themselves
over the Internet," explains Finning.
The site is mostly written using Active Server Pages (ASP) with
some HTML.
"For the database sections, we used the pairing of ASP code with
an odbc [open database connectivity, a Microsoft middleware
product] connection to talk to the databases needed," continues
Finning.
Each day, five news stories are flagged up in an animated
headline box using a standard Java applet. Perl 5 scripts were also
used for the site's discussion forum.
www.whi.org.uk
Curriculum vitae
Name: Mark Finning
Age: 29
Job title: designer
Qualifications: A-levels
IT skills: software and hardware configuration,
implementation and networking of PCs and Macs
Hobbies: music, songwriting, guitar
Favourite film: JFK
Favourite book: don't like books
Finning on Finning: confident, inventive,
quick-thinking
e is for excellence
Have you developed or designed an innovative e-commerce project?
If so,e-mail us atcwxtra@rbi.co.uk