Ballinora community website

Abstract

For my Final Year Project, I elected to partner up with Community-Academic Research Links (CARL), which is an initiative within UCC that provides support to community and voluntary groups. The CARL project which I was interested mostly in, and ended up choosing, was to develop a website for the Ballinora – Waterfall community. The Ballinora – Waterfall community currently have a website in place. However, the administrators are experiencing serious difficult when attempting to maintain and update the content. This issue arises from the fact that WordPress was used to develop the current website, and the administrators are finding the WordPress dashboard quite complex to deal with. With WordPress websites, you cannot interact directly with the database used. For this project, I have created an SQL Server database which will store the website’s data. Admin will be able to quickly, easily & dynamically interact with this database to update website content. All interaction with the database will occur via the website which I have developed. The aim of this project is to develop a website to meet the following goals: (e) Promote Community Engagement – build strong local relationships. (f) Encourage Social Inclusion – make locals feel valued & important. (g) Increase Advertising Revenue – to help maintain & update the website. (h) Enable administrators to easily & dynamically manage website content. These goals will be met, provided the following can be accomplished: (e) Promote community participation, by enabling locals to create groups. (f) Enable locals to share content (upcoming events, knowledge, photos, news, ideas, etc.). (g) Deliver an aesthetically-pleasing website layout & design. (h) Create an admin panel to allow administrators to frequently update content.