Cracking IT find out what makes a good website

Cracking IT is a group of women who meet at Baggator every Monday to learn about IT. We could not do this without funding from Sword Apak!

What makes a good website?

In today’s session we started to think about what makes a good website. We all like the current Baggator website but it needs to work better on phones and it needs to reflect what Baggator is doing now.

We used Google to search for similar projects so we could look at their websites. A search for ‘Community family activities’ brought up The Salvation Army and Parents.com. We liked the big picture on the Salvation Army site and thought a big picture of the side of the Baggator Building with it’s lovely painting would look good on our site. It needs a Baggator sign though! We liked the open layout and white spaces of both sites and really liked the way the blog posts were set out on the Parents site. When the pictures are all lined up that is called a grid but the masonry layout is better for us because we won’t have to use pictures that are all the same size.

Blog navigation

At the moment, all the blog posts on this site are in one place and to read them you have to scroll down. We would like the blog section to be split into 4 areas, IT, Gardening, Cooking and Wall Art, each with a nice picture and a link to the posts.

Setting up a practice website

We set up a free WordPress website to practice on. We can all log into it and use it to learn how to upload pictures, embed videos and write posts. We will use our good ideas from the practice site on the new site.

Images and sizes

We looked at Canva again and found out how to send an image to someone, either as a file they could edit, or just view. We also worked out how to save and download pictures so they could be uploaded to a website. On Canva, you can find send and upload to the top right. There are different options for saving the image:

  • png – best for wordy things
  • jpg – best for pictures for websites
  • pdf – best for documents to be downloaded to print off

Dots per inch

Image resolution is measured in DPI or dots per inch. For print it is usually 300 dots to the inch but for the web large images take up space and make a website slow so 72 is more common.

Plans for the future

We had a brilliant chat about making the Baggator website something really special with stories and recipes. We might make a gardening calendar as we go through next year and also a calendar of important events so we can share our multicultural lives. We also talked about how to make the best Turkish coffee – recipe coming soon!