Metaphorical explanation
The metaphorical explanation of the site that will be created is that of an institution of higher learning. There is registration of the students, section of the different users like students, faculty members, and administrators. The administrators have different privileges, while students and faculty have different privileges. In the university, there is a place for discussion of the different topics of interest. This is an interesting area. There is a need to include this interesting area. There is also the issue of content management of the website. This will include what is happening in the university and the upcoming events. Students will be required to be updated with this information. There are also the contacts of the institution where the students will want to be contacting the university (Yunfeng, 2010). The metaphorical explanation has been chosen to be this way because of the similarity of higher education websites with that one that the researcher will develop in this course. There will be users who will have different categories. There will also be different privileges assigned to users. This will depend on the roles that the users will have on the websites. There will be administrators who will have all the privileges. They can change the users’ privileges as they would suggest. There are the normal users to the site. They have normal privileges to the use of the site. They can use to browse and when they want to inquire about something, they can ask the administrator or the site contact person. Then there are managers who have enhanced roles than the users. They can have the users change their usage of the site according to their own discretion. They have a different view of the site. They are able to advise the administrators regarding some users who will change the view of the different users according to the advice of the managers (Sivaji, Abdullah, & Downe, 2011).
Site structure listing
The website will have the following listing:
- Homepage
- About us
- Introduction
- Vision, mission, and values
- Open vacancies
- Registration
- Administrators
- Normal users
- Managers
- Visitors and friends
- Visiting the organization
- Maps and directions
- News
- Administration
- Governance
- New user
- Account management
- Contact us
- Twitter
- Facebook
Global and local navigation
The site structure is the skeleton part of the site and will contain the parts that are part of the website. The global links include Homepage, Registration, Visitors and friends, Administration, and Contact us. The site has been designed so that there is easy navigation from one site to another one. This is an important concept that is used to have users move from one place to another one. In the site, Homepage, Registration, Visitors and friends, Administration, and Contact us will appear in each web page so that it is easy for users to get the information from the global navigations. It is important to have these five because they are required in any web page. They have been designed using the buttons which have sub-listings. The local navigational links in the global links have been designed so that when the user passes the cursor the global links, the local links will appear as a sub-menu. The users will then find the links that they want to navigate (Ling, 2009).
References
Ling, F. A. N. (2009). A Research of the Quality Course Website Development [J]. Journal of Suzhou College of Education, 4, 103-105.
Yunfeng, M. (2010, March). A Study on Tactics for Corporate Website Development Aiming at Search Engine Optimization. In Education Technology and Computer Science (ETCS), 2010 Second International Workshop on (Vol. 3, pp. 673-675). IEEE.
Sivaji, A., Abdullah, A., & Downe, A. G. (2011, May). Usability Testing Methodology: Effectiveness of Heuristic Evaluation in E-Government Website Development. In Modelling Symposium (AMS), 2011 Fifth Asia (pp. 68-72). IEEE.
Appendix: Architectural blueprint
