Keith Grammar School
Keith Grammar School
School Road
Keith
Moray
AB55 5ES


Contact
Ivor Lee
01542 882461
ivor.lee@moray-edunet.gov.uk
Sunday 14 August
The last day of the Summer holiday and I sit here writing my Diary. Am I that sad a person or scared of what Margaret will do if I don’t get something written? I leave you to decide?
Progress so far
The website is about to go live albeit with only a dozen of so pages so far.
Progress in school
We have a Website group (SMT call it a committee!) which currently consists of yours truly, two of our support staff and a Parent (from the KGS Association). Next term I intend to include representatives of both the Teaching Staff and Pupils.

As Parents were receiving a major questionnaire about the school from Kirkland Rowell last term the idea of sending a separate one on the website was rejected by the SMT. So I have put this on the back burner for later this year.

One aspect that is frustrating me at the moment is the lack of good photographs we have - or appear to have. We seem to have plenty of grainy or out of focus ones! So another task for next term is to find exactly what photographs we do have.
Website Progress
Before starting properly I decided to view other Secondary school’s sites using Take2theweb’s Millenium Schools links and the Scottish Schools Online site. On reflection I am not sure whether this was a good idea or not as it started to confuse me about who the site should be aimed at and what it should contain. Parents, pupils, staff, other visitors? In reality it is for all of these groups so the decision was made that the content of different pages should reflect the target audience.

I decided that the site would use a logo as the background for each page. The logo was produced and uploaded to the site. My first problem - the logo was cut by the header and footer. An e-mail to John soon rectified this when he altered the footer to make it transparent. Many thanks John for the help.

Another problem I have is that I want a different format for the top of my page. The T2W format is Logo & Banner. I want a Logo - Banner - Logo format. I e-mailed John to ask if this can be done. His helpful reply was that no one had asked for this before but it was a good idea and that he would arrange for the change to be made. Hopefully this change will be ready next week so I can get the style updated.
Problems and frustrations

(1) Tables

I like displaying information in tabular form and this has probably given me my biggest headache. My first attempt was to produce the table on the T2W site-using HTML. (I enjoy working in HTML - how sad is that?) This seemed a slow way of doing things and when I viewed the page the table was too far down the page - well away from where it should have been placed.

So I deleted this and decided to produce the table offline and check what it would look like before putting it on the T2W site.

T2W have an Excel converter on their site so I thought I would use this. I produced the table in Excel and followed the instructions on T2W’s site to render it into HTML. The render engine worked, the table was in the correct place but it had lost all the formatting. So this was no use to me.

My next thought was to use Notepad. You type in the data including the HTML tags you need. Then save the file as xxxx.html . You can then view it offline using your web browser.

My table was fine offline so I copied it to T2W but again it was too far down the page! I was now beginning to get frustrated. Is there anything on the T2W site to explain this problem - not as far as I can see? Can the guide be extended to include a troubleshooting section?

Perhaps the answer lay in using Notepad? My next idea was to use Microsoft Office Frontpage 2003. For those who do not know it Frontpage is a website design program. You enter your text, data, images, formatting etc. and the program automatically codes it for you. Drew the table in Frontpage design view, went to code view and copied the code produced. This was then pasted onto the T2W site. Result the table was exactly as I had produced in Frontpage but still in the wrong place!

Now I was getting really frustrated - ask my wife! What was I missing? Back to the one code that had worked - the T2W rendered table. The code started with a tag - . My codes did not have this tag. So I typed this at the start of my Frontpage code - Eureka.

It had been a steep learning curve but a useful one.

(2) File Upload template

This appears to have disappeared from the T2W site as have other of the templates? I will e-mail John about this next week.

(3) Page preview

As you may gather I like working offline and checking what it will look like before uploading the data and code.

My frustration with the T2W template is that you have to Save & View to see what the page looks like. Is there any way of a thumbnail page preview when a page is being edited?
Monday 15 August - Update
Two entries in two days!

I spoke to John today about my "frustrations and problems" and, as usual, he was really helpful.

We had a long chat about CSS and he has convinced me how much more convenient it is than HTML. He has even converted one of my HTML tables to CSS and having looked at the coding I see what he means.

So now I have to learn CSS! By September 14th I plan to be up to scratch with it.

File Upload
Problem solved - you use the multimedia file upload template. Thanks John for the information.

That will teach me to check carefully in future!