The website development has begun as more symbols are being added to the database and over 1
20 have been accepted by participants voting via the symbol management system. These will be made available on the globalsymbols.com website when it is launched.
Sadly many of the web addresses linked to the use of the word ‘tawasol’ had been taken. The team voted on a collection of addresses that could be used and it was decided that we should also have a re-direct from arabicsymbols.org.
Then we collected the options for website designs provided by Dana, our graphic designer and added them to a Google form in order to have a voting session on which was considered the best option. See below…
It turned out that Dana’s last version No 4 came out top with 21 to 19 votes being the sum of the different criteria. This has provided the basis for the wire frames that have now been submitted to the team for further comments.
The team decided that where possible in-house designed symbols should appear as guides to content. Pages should be simple and short and work well on portable devices.
The responsive design and accessibility criteria have led to some restrictions in particular to the width of presentation and the number of symbols that can be viewed at once. Two sites separate have been prepared with English and Arabic on offer via a WordPress content management system which means anyone with a login can update basic content.
Issues with downloading symbol files were detected early on in the trials with emails being received from beta testers pointing out the corruption of the Arabic labels. This was resolved when it was discovered that in Windows the process of zipping data caused the corruption to occur – this did not appear to happen on iOS or Mac systems. A .rar compression format is now offered as well and this has solved the problem.
In-house beta testing revealed other issues which were dealt with such as news not appearing and missed links etc at a very basic level. The second phase of development could now start with the introduction of an API (application program interface) to host the dictionary database and filtering system.