Cultivate Interactive Design Specification

Background

This paper provides the design specification for the Cultivate Interactive web magazine.

Technical Architecture for Cultivate Interactive

Cultivate Interactive will be hosted on a Windows NT server running the Microsoft SiteServer software. The web service will make use of ASP technologies. ASP is used to:

Load SSI (server-side include) fragments
Link in style sheet files depending on the user agent.

General

A simple design is required for Cultivate Interactive. The design produced by ILRT for the Exploit Interactive web magazine was well-received, and a similar approach is expected.

Elements of the Web Magazine

Designs are required for three main areas of the web magazine:

The main entry point (which will be <www.cultivate-int.org>). This page will be the initial entry point for many visitors, and so should encourage visitors to explore the web site. The page will contain links to issues of the magazine, information about the magazine, information for authors and a search interface. See the Exploit Interactive as an example.
The entry point for a new issue (e.g. see <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/>). See the Exploit Interactive as an example.
Individual articles (e.g. see <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/ell/>).

Outline Of An Article

The outline of an article is illustrated below:

Typical Article

The following type of articles will be included:

Feature Articles: Articles about DIGICULT projects and related work
Regular Articles: Regular articles (e.g. technology watch, behind the web site, etc.
News and Events:
Misc: Misc articles

Directory Structure

The underlying directory structure is illustrated below:

directory structure

Note the following:

The main entry points will be:

<www.cultivate-int.org> - main entry point
<www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/> - main entry point for issue 1
<www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/reynardus> - main entry point for an article about the Reynardus project published in issue 1

Internal hyperlinks should normally link to a directory (and not to a .asp or .htm / .html file).

Elements such as the navigational bar will be included as a SSI. An example of an article template is given below:

<html> <head> <title>Cultivate Interactive Issue <%=current_issue%>: <%=article_title%></title>  ..</head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" background="../../resources/images/<%=bg_image%>">

Graphical Elements

The following graphical elements are required:

A navigational bar
A separator between items
Icons for links to additional information (see bottom of an article in current issue).
A Go! icon for the search engine.
A series of Link icons to identify links in article references. This should distinguish between (i) a remote link (ii) a broken remote link (iii) a mailto: link and (iv) a broken mailto: link.

Browser and Accessibility Issues

The web site should aim to conform to WAI accessibility guidelines. In particular (a) images should have a meaningful ALT attribute, (b) use of tables for formatting is discouraged, (c) CSS should be used for defining layout wherever possible, (b) frames should be avoid if possible.

It is recognised that the accessibility requirements may be constrained by limitations of the browsers used to access the web site. A profile of expected browser types can be obtained by looking at the Exploit Interactive statistics available here.

Ownership

Ownership of all images, code, etc. produced will belong to UKOLN. Note that a reusable format of images must be provided.

Budget

A budget of * is available.

Acknowledgements

The Cultivate Interactive web site will provide acknowledgements to the designers.