My client for my Live Client Project is a training company based in Nottingham called Safety Problem Solutions Ltd. They offer hundreds of courses and qualifications in driving, construction, safety and many more areas.

All of these courses will need to be presented on the website, making the project a very large scale prospect. I will need to create and populate a database system in order to handle the sheer amount of data that needs to be presented on the site. A dynamic system will make the project easier to handle and will ensure the site is much easier to maintain in the future. I also propose to develop a Content Management System which will allow me and/or the client to add, edit and delete data from the database via a customly designed interface.

This post outlines the artefacts I intend to create in term two. As of now, I have planned 5 of my artefacts, leaving just one more.

Artefact One
Twitter Based New Aggregator
What?: For this artefact, I will be creating a Twitter based news aggregator which will contain tweets reporting news, each with a link to the full story. I will then measure the number of people who view the tweets only and those who also click on the links to the full news story.
Why?: This artefact will attempt to identify the value of Twitter and other social networks as a news provider in their own right or whether they only act as 'taster' services and require backup from further reading.

Artefact Two
Subscriptions Mini-site
What?: For this artefact, I will be creating a small and to the point, promotional website for The Times website (the only major UK newspaper to charge for online content). The site will feature an option to proceed if you want to know more about subscribing and an option to decline proceeding any further.
Why?: This artefact will help to see if a subscription-only business model is a feasible model for the future of online news content.

Artefact Three
Questionnaire
What?: This artefact will be a paper-based questionnaire featuring general questions regarding the way in which people access their news today.
Why?: This artefact will help provide context and is likely to demonstrate the variety of different mediums being used to access news in todays age.

Artefact Four
Selective Consumption Mini-site
What?: This artefact will be a small website with large clear links to BBC Home/BBC Sport/BBC Entertainment etc. It will prompt people to click on the BBC Home link if they want a general collection of todays news, or the BBC Sport link if they just want todays sports headlines and so on.
Why?: This artefact will help to measure how selective consumers have become today.


Artefact Five
Expert Interview
What?: This artefact will be an interview with an industry professional; more specifically, an employee of a news company who distribute their news through both print and online channels.
Why?: This artefact will provide reliable, qualitative research on the current state of the newspaper market and help to measure the level of success of online news.

Artefact Six
?

So, over the last 4/5 weeks I've put a lot of work into my PRP module. Originally, I had planned to explore the areas of CSS3 and HTML5, as these are the cutting edge technologies of my area of interest; web design. However, after discussion with my tutor we agreed that this topic did not have enough scope or background research.

After much thought I moved onto the effect that Internet has had on the business world. This was refined to concentrate on the media publishing industry and the final refinement was to specifically look at the news media publishing industry. So my final research question is as follows:

What are the pressures that continue to shape the contemporary news media publishing industry as it adapts to new opportunities made available by online platforms?

I read the relevant chapters of several pieces of literature during my research and noted down all quotes that I thought may be of use to me as well as all the terms that I thought may be interesting to talk about in my paper. I ended up with 16 pages worth of quotes and research notes which made subsequent work regarding my PRP a lot easier to handle.

After having done my research I planned each section of the document down to each point so I knew everything that I wanted to discuss in the paper, meaning all I had to do then was articulate the points I had noted down. I have since submitted my first draft and received largely positive comments from my tutor.

To provide a summary of my research document, here is my abstract taken from my first draft:

This research paper aims to identify the pressures that are continuing to shape the news media publishing business as it adapts to opportunities made available by online opoortunities. The Internet is at the heart of the challenge to the industry (Ward, 1998) so I will be examining the impact it has had and the challenges it has brought with it.

Declining newspaper readership, accelerated by the emergence of the Internet, underlines just how important it is for the industry to adapt to online opportunities, as revenue from physical sales dries up. The internets gigantic range of free to access sources has triggered a transition in power from the news provider to the consumer, who can now afford to be “selective in [their] consumption of information” (Stephens, 2007).

The Internet has also triggered other trends into motion such as citizen journalism (amateur/untrained journalism), which could be a reason for the perceived decrease in credibility of news content today. Furthermore, a new trend of ‘infotainment’ has emerged, with the ever increasing use of videos and audio podcasts to accompany news articles, raising the question; is the printed newspaper still enough to satisfy our entertainment needs?

News media publishing businesses will have to adapt their business models in order to take advantage of opportunities made available by online platforms. Models involving pay-per-click advertising, donation systems and subscription-based viewing are some of the main business models in use at this time. It has been argued that “Adaption to digital media is not an option, but a strategic necessity” (Birkenshaw, 2002).

It is fair to conclude that targeting will be utilised in a major way in the coming years in order to maximise revenue generated from online advertising. Additionally, selective consumption habbits may accelerate the demise of the newspaper, but ultimately, it can be concluded that if news media publishing businesses do not embrace the digital age, it is likely they will not be able to compete in the industry.

In contrast to the previous business models I have discussed for the monetising of online news content, the donations system relies on the reader for revenue, which involves the reader donating a sum of their choosing to the provider. Such a model can be hard to manage as income levels would vary due to the lack of control the news provider has. However, it could be argued that this model provides the greatest control over their income, as donation levels would be directly affected by the perceived quality of the news content provided. In this sense, the news provider has great control over the level of income they are likely to receive.

Wikipedia (although news is not their primary service) operates on a donations business model, relying on user donations to pay the bills. Recently Wikipedia have introduced a very large banner at the top of the page throughout their website, urging users to donate to keep the site ad-free.

Personally, I feel that if they need to produce huge banners to push users to donate, is it really any more beneficial than implementing ads on the site? These ads might discourage some from viewing the website due to their intrusive nature; but there are few adverts that would be more intrusive than the huge banner Wikipedia have temporary installed to encourage donations!

My previous post discussed The Times website and it's move to make all of its online news content viewable on a subscription only basis. This business model is strongly supported by The Times owner, Rupert Murdoch who believes that the viewing of all online news content should be paid for

As The Times website has shown, this business model can be devasting in terms of website traffic leading other newspaper providers to choose other business models for the distribution of their online content.

The Sun and The Daily Mail websites have opted to display adverts on their websites as a way of generating income through their online content. These ads can generate revenue through charging a fixed rate to display a particular sized advert banner. Alternatively, sites can recieve income based on the number of clicks an advert has received.

This method allows the newspaper websites to present their news content online free of charge; however these ads can also be rather intrusive and could actually distract or deter the reader from reading the news content.

I have recently been concentrating on research for my Personal Research Product within which I am focusing on the News Media Publishing industry and how it has been effected by the Internet and the challenges brought with it.

After some brief research into online business models for news organisations, I soon came accross Rupert Murdoch's strong views on the availability of online news content. His ideal web involves news platforms that are viewable on a subscription only basis; his main obstacle being the BBC who are obliged to deliver free online content.

However, determined to change the outlook for online news content, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp made a very brave decision in July of this year by making their website for The Times newspaper viewable to users on a subscription only basis.

I thought this was very interesting and helpful to my research into a news media publishing industry that is constantly being re-shaped. It has made me think; is this the mainstream birth of a widely adopted business model for online news? Or will it simply fail to hold water in an age where there are endless free alternatives?

Early signs are inconclusive. Four months after the 'paywall' went up, 100,000 people have paid to use their website in addition to a further 100,000 who are given free access as they subscribe to the printed version. However, website visits have decreased by 87% from 21 million unique users per month to just 2.7 million. Having said that, The Times themselves actually admitted that they "fully expected at least 90% of the audience to depart". So having lost 87%, can the move be deemed a success?

I suppose time will tell!

This is just a quick post regarding my progress with the Personal Research Project. After many [terrible] ideas, I have finally settled on a Research Question for my paper! So here it is:

What are the pressures that continue to shape the contemporary news media publishing industry as it adapts to new opportunities made available by online platforms?

I can finally crack on with some actual research now!

I hope to look at how news organisations have been pressured into altering their business models in order to take advantage of new online platforms, as the newspaper's value decreases due to the sheer volume of cheaper/more practical alternatives.

I have completed my Simulated Client Project on digital piracy and I am really pleased with the final output.

I put a huge amount of work into the visual design and presenting all of the facts and statistics in a format that people would enjoy viewing.

The Final Product
http://stephengreig.co.uk/digital-piracy-facts-figures/

If I were to do the project again, I would design it so the rulers at the top and bottom only go up to the number of sections there are, as I believe the way I have designed it may cause the user to think that there are more than 9 sections.

I'm well into the 1st term of my final year at uni now, but due to a couple months of internet troubles I haven't given my blog the attention that I probably should have done at this stage. So here's an update on my progress so far.

Simulated Client Project

The first project of the year was the Simulated Client Project which was a short warm-up project, lasting 3 weeks; the brief being to create a piece of work that informs about digital piracy. My idea for the project came whilst doing some initial research and only being able to find large blocks of text on the subject which I really didn't want to read. So I decided to put the emphasis on presenting the information in a way that people would enjoy reading. I soon came up with the idea of creating an infographic, which - due to the amount of different info I wanted to display - became an interactive infographic, with the help of some jQuery.

To keep the infographic interesting and engaging, I designed each of the different sections uniquely, each with their own colour scheme, typhography and shapes. I believe this strategy increases the chances of the user viewing the piece of work right through to the end, rather than leaving after the first couple of sections.

The final product can be seen in my next blog post.

With the World Cup fast approaching, it seems like a good time to reflect on one of the biggest events in the world in terms of design.

Since the first tournement in 1930 the World Cup has taken place every four years (excluding 1942 and 1946 due to WWII), with each event delivering it's own style and flare in the design. Such a timescale allows us to view any transitions in design trends, any timeless works of art that wouldn't look out of place in todays world, as well as the designs that errm... I'm sure were good at the time.

1930 - Uruguay



1934 - Italy



1938 - France



1950 - Brazil



1954 - Switzerland



1958 - Sweden



1962 - Chile



1966 - England



1970 - Mexico



1974 - West Germany



1978 - Argentina



1982 - Spain



1986 - Mexico



1990 - Italy



1994 - USA



1998 - France


2002 - Korea Republic & Japan



2006 - Germany



2010 - South Africa


My View
This collection of World Cup art provides an excellent range of designs.

I was particularly impressed with the logo and poster designs from Mexico '70. I love the simplified football which provides a big, bold focal point of the poster which also complements the stylish text below it. The basic colours used round off the design to create a very simple, yet effective design, very reminiscent of design trends 40 years on. Truly a timeless design.

Another poster design worthy of a mention is from Argentina '78. This is another poster design that wouldn't look out of place in todays industry, notably thanks to the bold, striking typography which reads vertically on the left hand side in an attractive and simple font.

This years poster for South Africa 2010 is another of my favourites, with a really nice use of colour, all of which complement each other very nicely, creating a warm feel to the design. Adding to its appeal is a very clever and creative use of the continent's shape, linking it to football extremely elegantly.

My favourite logo by quite a distance is from Japan and Korea 2002. Clearly inspired by the Fifa World Cup Trophy, it has been beautifully smplified to create an easy on the eye, elegant composition. It seems this design has cemented itself as the official world cup stamp, as an incarnation of the design has featured in both logo designs of the two World Cups since 2002.

The I'm sure they were good at the time designs:
Spain '82 (Poster).
Mexico '86 (Poster).

To sum up, I believe there has been an evident forward movement in terms of design since the turn of the century, with an improvement in most areas of technical design such as use of colour, placement, creativity and simplicity. Having said that, some of the designs from 60-80 years ago are really quite impressive considering the limited set of tools they would have had to work with compared to today.

After having created my Flash MP3 player (link), the tracks in it could be edited by editing the XML file that is linked to in the Player's ActionScript code. I thought this was fine as it would save you from having to dive into the FLA file every time you wanted to make a change. Then I had a brain wave in terms of how I could take this one step further. I've got more and more confident with PHP and MYSQL as this project has progressed and I thought there must be a way to populate the XML file using PHP and MYSQL.

So after a few google searches I found that I could create a very simple PHP script that creates an XML file that stores the media player's track data.


I started by creating the MYSQL table that will hold the track data - this will be used by the PHP script to populate the XML file.

My next step was to create the PHP file. The script can be seen in the image below.


Firstly, the SQL query gets the data from the music table and the ORDER BY keyword ensures that the latest track entered into the database appears at the top of the list in the mp3 player.
Then using PHP I have constructed the XML document, within which I have used a while loop in order to get the track name and file path from the database and insert them into the XML file.

Finally, in the MP3 Players ActionScript, where it previously linked to the XML document I have simply changed this to link to the php file.

After completing these steps I could then create a simple HTML form and accompanying PHP script so the admin can upload a new track to the MP3 player without having to edit an XML file and upload it back to the server.


I have also added a delete track form which simply deletes the record from the database where the name = the name typed in by the admin into the form.

Since my last post I have made the blog posts so they can be edited or deleted so I am going to exlain how I have achieved this. I will also briefly go over the gigs page which I have also made into a dynamic php page populated by a MYSQL database.

Delete Blog Post
Firstly, I needed the blog page to display edit and delete buttons on each post but only whilst the admin is logged in. So within the php I wrote the html for the buttons in the blog post loop in blog.php - the pseudo code is basically if user is logged in, display these buttons. I wrapped the buttons in a form so I could use the method="post" attribute to provide information to the php script. The form includes a hidden input type, the value of which contains the $id variable of the post you want to delete. When the delete button is clicked it runs deletepost.php which simply executes an SQL query to delete the record from the table where the id=$id ($id is the variable which holds the id of the post you want to delete).

You can see on the image above that when logged in, there are options to logout, edit or delete in the head of each blog post.

Edit Blog Post
The edit button works in much the same way although the process is slightly different. When clicked, the edit button takes the user to editpost.php which features an html form reminiscent of the blog post form in the admin area. However this form is already filled in with the appropriate content by setting the field values to variables that contain data taken from the blog post you want to edit. This way, the form fields already have the existing blog post content ready for it to be edited by the user. When this form is submited, it then runs edit.php which executes an SQL query to update this particular record in the table with the new data.

In the image above you can see that when the edit button is clicked, it takes the user to the edit blog post page which features a form that is already populated with the existing blog post content ready to be edited.

Gigs Page
I have made the gigs page editable with PHP and MYSQL in exactly the same way as the blog page. The image below shows what the gigs page looks like when the admin is logged in.

The edit and delete options work in exactly the same way as I described for the blog.
The image below is the admin area page which fetaures forms to make a blog post and to add a gig.


Upload a File with Blog Post
The admin has the option to upload a file with their blog post. If they choose to do so, the file is uploaded to the /blogfiles directory and the file name (image.png or audio.mp3) is inserted into the database. Then in the blog post php script, the script reads; if the file name contains 'jpg', 'png', 'gif' or 'jpeg' then wrap it in <"img"> tags. If the file name contains 'mp3' then wrap it in <"a"> tags and show mp3image.png - when this image is clicked it goes to the audio file so it can be listened to.

In this post I am going to explain how I have created a form that allows a user to post a blog with the option of also uploading an image. I will also explain how I have created a login system so only the site admin can access the admin area and post a blog.

Posting a Blog
Firstly, I created a page with a simple html form, with fields for the blog's title, content and an upload file field. When submitted, the form runs insert.php which uses SQL to insert the form contents into the appropriate fields in the blog database table. If the user selects an image to upload, the insert.php file also uploads this image to a directory named /blogimages on the server. So if the user uploads an image called img.png, the file will be uploaded to stephengreig.co.uk/newjack/blogimages/img.png. The text img.png will be inserted into the image field in the MYSQL database table.

When the form is submitted, the form content is inserted into the blog database table as shown in the image below.

Now the data is in the database, the blog.php is updated with the new blog post.

Login System
Obviously, we don't want any random user to be able to add blog posts to the blog, so I have made the admin area page require the user to be logged in. There is a button on the blog page which reads 'admin area', which when clicked takes the user to adminlogin.php. This page simply features a html form (with username and password fields) which when submitted runs login.php.

The login.php file then checks to see if the username and password entered are in the members database table; if they aren't the user is redirected to a page which reads login failed; if the username and password entered are in the members database table then the user is redirected to the admin area page where they can then add a blog post.

It is important to note that the admin area page also features some php code that says the page requires auth.php in order for it to be displayed. The auth.php file basically checks to see if the user is logged in or not.

Also in the admin area page is a logout link which when clicked runs logout.php. This file ends the user session and redirects them to a page which tells them they have been logged out.

Remaining Tasks

• Make user able to edit blog posts
• Make user able to delete blog posts
• Make file upload in post blog form accept image AND mp3 files
• Make gigs page so it is populated using a MYSQL database
• Make add/edit/delete gigs form in admin area
• Make PHP contact form
  

I've come a long way since my last blog post where I explained that all I had left to do was the PHP/MYSQL elements of the website.

A bit of a Moan
I started the project with no experience of using data driven content in a website so I've had to learn a lot in the past couple of weeks. A bit of a moan here but most of what I've learnt has come from online resources after many, many Google searches as opposed to learning through my seminars. Some PHP learning material was provided but I felt the way in which it was delivered was not particularly ideal for learning. For example being made to complete pointless exercises instead of applying what we'd learnt to our projects was particularly annoying. Last week I didn't attend a seminar so I could actually do work on my project at home instead of wasting time in a seminar applying what I'd learnt to a pointless exercise! These exercises are good hypothetic scenarios to use to learn IF WE NEED THEM but if not, I don't expect to be MADE to complete them. It's like being back at school.

MYSQL Database for Blog
This is what my database table looks like for the blog/news feed.

The table is pretty self-explanitory; there is a field for the news posts id, date, title, content and there is also a field incase the user uploads an image (this field simply stores the image's path rather than the image itself).
Below we can see the current data that the table is holding.

The blog.php page is populated using this data. After wrapping certain php variables in html tags in order for a heavy styling session with css, the blog page currently appears as show below.

MYSQL Database for blog comments
The blog I have created makes use of a commenting system. When the 'comments' link is clicked on the blog post, the page displays a single post view which shows the blog post, the comments and an add comment form - as shown below.

When the user enters information into the form and clicks submit, the data is inputted into the database. It is inserted into a separate table from the blog table and it is assigned to the appropriate blog post with the news_id field. This table is solely for storing comments.


In my next post:

• In my next blog post I will show how I have created a form to post a new blog post as well as upload an image.

• I will also show how I have created a login system so the admin area can be viewed only when a user is logged in.