1. Decide how you want your website to function. I wanted the archive to be organised by people, where one could only access the archive material through people’s personal ‘homepages’. I wanted the traces of the Play of Archiving to be linked to the archive material. I also wanted people to be linked together by matching things in their profiles, matching archive items, and Plays of Archiving that they might have done together. I also made a distinction between documentation, which was what I called those items that had not been part of a Play of Archiving, and archive items, which had been part of a Play of Archiving. Finally, I wanted people to be able to alter the description and keywords for archive items.
2. Make a concept outline. This is to show how the website functions. I made a rough drawing, or mock-up, using two fictional players to develop how I could make a Digitales Archives website that had the functions that I wanted, meaning: how could players use the webpages, what should be on the webpages, where the pages should link to, etc. I used a pen and paper to do this, and then I made a digital copy using Paint. You can find the outline in the blog’s March archives.
3. Make technical outline. This is to show how the website is constructed. I made a mock-up showing each page of the Digitales Archives website, what information would be on the page, and where the page linked to. You can find the outline in the blog’s April archives.
4. Make the graphic design of the website. I worked in collaboration with Arnaud Dejeammes to design the way the Digitales Archives Website would look. We used Photoshop and Paint.
5. Do the html. I used notepad and a WYSIWYG ( what you see is what you get) html editor. I decided to make my prototype using only html, so there is no database or programming behind it. This means that this prototype Digitales Archives website illustrates the idea. The addition of programming and a database are what is needed to make this prototype a working site.
6. Test. I checked the website to see that all of the images were loading and that all of the links worked properly. You can also test the website on different browsers and with different operating systems.