Project A Rationale

I was originally intending to build a site covering the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for project A, but due to the Paralympic's the websites covering the Olympics have been updated to cover the Paralympic games. Meaning that all the information i require to complete my website such as results and events have been removed. This forced me choose another current affairs topic for my web page. So i decided to build a site covering the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia. The reason i chose this topic was quite simply because i knew nothing about it and that building a site which provides information on the conflict would not only assist in my understanding of the topic but might help people who would also like to gain an insight into the conflict. I decided to use Synthasite to construct my web page as it is easy to use and provides a simple template for users to navigate through. Synthasite also allowed me to ad videos and images, which would be very helpful in working with the information to portray a rounded overview of the issues. I structured the website with a background page, which delves into the background behind the conflict as well as a historical timeline of the Georgian region. The second page was Part A of the timeline leading up to the conflict and part B was a timeline of the conflict itself. I focused on the main events with use of videos and maps to give the reader a better understanding of the events taking place. The fourth page on the tab and the sites home page shows the latest news, and quite simply gives an account of the most recent news to come out of the crisis. The fifth page is a forum, which is in the form of a chat room. I added this so that the website user could interact with the site allowing for a web 2.0 experience. The chat room allows users to post their opinions on the conflict. The final page, is my views on the conflict and critique of the sources i used. Hopefully this site fulfills its goals in assisting someone who has absolutely no knowledge of the conflict to gain further insight into the events of the last month.

- Seb Blaszczyk