Title

Student.Manchester, An Interactive Guide to the city, targeted at the sub 30yr. old demographic. An Insight into Web site design.

A thesis submitted to Manchester Metropolitan Universtiy in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Computing.

Martin John Allen, BSc.
Department of Computing and Mathematics, September 1998.

Abstract

Student.Manchester is a prototype for an interactive web guide to the city of Manchester, targeted at the 18-30 yr. old age group. The initial design phase encompasses an investigation into current web guides and web sites, research into determining users' needs and the browsers that are used to view the web. The paradigms used in both interface and web design are discussed and used to produce a blueprint for the site's implementation. The implementation of the site brings together the web technologies of HTML, JavaScript and Java for the user interface: with a search engine realised using the scripting language Perl. In addition, research into the major search engines of the web and how they index sites is applied to improve the structure of Student.Manchester so that it achieves better rankings. How international copyright law can be used to protect work is also discussed.

Environments : Unix, Windows, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Perl, Java, and JavaScript.

The project is was hosted on a NCSA Webserver at the Department of Computing, Manchester Metropolitan University.