WEBSITE ANALYSIS

Website Analysis



Website Analysis

Description

The site which is to be analysed www.scotlandyard.police.uk is intended for eLearning students and will deliver custom lesson content based upon the students learning profile. Once registered with the system students are required to take two brief tests. The effects of site are slightly gloomy with dark exposure. These tests allow the system to decide upon the individual learning profile of each student. The two tests used are VARK (Visual, Aural, Read, and Kinesthetic) and Honey & Mumford. If at the end of the tests the system is unable to quantify a student more questions are presented until a learning profile can be decided. Once a student has completed the tests the individual lessons are then presented in an optimal fashion driven by the profile deduced during the tests. During the lessons a student is free to take lesson modules that have been judged as non-optimal for their particular learning style, they can then decide if the module was presented in a fashion that was compatible for them and their learning profile is 'tweaked' accordingly.

Technology

The site uses PHP and HTML to serve dynamic web pages, MySQL is used as the database storage engine. The pages themselves make use of HTML, layers and CSS styles to create the layout. PHP is used to deliver the dynamic content and query the MySQL database.

Code

The PHP code is fairly well written and clean, a brief code review finds no obvious problems although a full code review was not in scope for the documentation project, a full code review is advisable at a later stage before the site enters into production. The HTML is fairly straightforward and the page designs are clean. The main concern in this area is the extensive use of in-line CSS styles; it would be beneficial to move all style declarations to an external style sheet to facilitate easy maintenance and code readability. Additionally, no cross-browser compatibility testing was performed as it was not in scope of the documentation project; it would be advisable to test the site thoroughly using Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7, Mozilla Firefox and Opera at the very least.

Functionality

It is understood that the system is a work in progress, it is therefore unclear just which functional problems are due to incompletion and which are due to either design flaws or code bugs. Several key processes lack definition and do not ...