Communication & the community
The Brief
From the brief:
Working as part of a small group, produce a website on the theme of "a treasure hunt", integrating story telling and gameplay and utilising external resources such as YouTube, Flickr, and Google Earth. You may choose the focus of the "treasure hunt". For example it could have a marketing or an educational purpose.
The Proposal
Our group, made up of Chris Cook, Charlotte Baxter and myself, decided to create a simple quiz website aimed at children in the Hull area. Since the development period was around Easter, we decided to make this the primary theme of the website, with questions about Hull and the Easter period.
Preparation & development
We prepared by meeting as a group after tutorials every week and discussing our ideas and plans for the project. Early on we developed a visual style for the site, and a dynamic system written in PHP for the quiz section of the website. As a group, we brainstormed questions for the quiz and tested these against our user base. With a visual front-end written in xHTML & CSS, a backend for handling the quiz's questions and answers written in PHP, and questions suitable for our user base, we were able to create a simple site following the brief.
We kept a barely-updated blog about our project experiences over at Blogspot.
Achievements & setbacks
Working as a group we were able to develop a suitable website for our userbase and fulfill the brief. However, some of our initial ideas were not realised.
- Developing a database with dozens of questions for the PHP backend to reference, rather than a flat list of 10 questions.
- Making the Flash Egg mascot more interactable, perhaps with sound.
- A more dynamic "hints" system to allow a user only a certain amount of hints per try.
As a group, we also failed to update the project blog as regularly as possible, choosing to spend more time developing the website.
In terms of creating a relevant website for our userbase, we feel we have developed an ideal solution. The theme of the site is appealing to children, based around one of their favourite times of the year, and ergonomically designed to be usable and accessible to anyone with the smallest amount of web-savviness. We feel the universal usability of our site is one of its primary achievements.
The end product
The Egghead's Egghunt is available for playing at this address.