So, as discussed in Part 1, I created an interactive start page that would instruct all members on how to work their way around the site. As well as ensuring people could work the way around the site, the instructions were provided to ensure people used the site in a certain way. The power of the site would be in viewing video files and commenting around these, so I had to ensure that people could easily find the clips they wanted. The first step was to create a simple folder structure which would house clips for each game of the Six Nations tournament, simple. But to ensure that each member was seeing these folders in the same order, they had to initially set up their “sort” selection. Hence the following picture from the interactive start page:

Once members had done this, files and folders would always appear in the order we intended them to appear. So, members could either manually look through a selection of clips from each game, or they could take advantage of the search function of the site.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the next two images from the interactive start page!

By using this workflow, we could insure that members were easily seeing the clips they wanted to because they were using the same workflow as us. TPE searches for words in the title of files and in the description text of these files, so when we were uploading clips, we had to insure that we were all sticking to a set workflow. File names would start with 01,02 etc and then display a single keyword from either the “Offence Area” or “Other” column (see above) . This ensured that files would be displayed in the order that they occurred within the game and also easily notify a member of what to focus on in the video. This meant that to avoid a cluttered title name, we would insert our keywords into the description of each file. To make this simple for each uploader, and to avoid mistakes in the written descriptions, a “Description Generator” was created in Excel. This would make the user select a keyword from drop down menus for each clip, which resulted in a single text box for each clip being filled with the correct description. All that was then left to do was to copy and paste this text into the description of each file.

Now this may sound like a lot of ‘faffing’ around, but I can assure you it was not and it led to the creation of a site that was simple for any user. The actual user’s set-up workflows only had to be completed once and the uploader workflow was very quick to master and ensured the ease of use for everybody involved.

Overall, the whole workflow creation process became a showcase for all involved on how they can make their respective TPE sites run more efficiently. And you’ve just seen what it is! How generous I am! Feel free to shower me with gifts when you see fit.

Stay tuned, Part 3 is coming shortly. It’s time for the site to Go Live!!!

JB