My First Website - A Site dedicated to the Potato

Introduction

I'm new here on this Article Website so before going into the topic of my love of the potato, I thought I might introduce myself. I was born and live in Birmingham in the United Kingdom, My mother and father where originally from the Caribbean, I'm an IT professional but dream of having a simple life. I have special memories of helping my father in his allotment when I was young. At the time, my father grew a wonderful assortment of healthy fruit and vegetables. Sometimes while tapping away on my computer my mind wonders back to those days. I have to be honest and say the food he grew tasted better than what can be brought from any supermarket or shopping mall these days and was more precious because my brother, sisters and I understood the effort that had gone into producing them.

My View on the Potato

My family for the most part depended on rice and the potato for the bulk of our diet but I've always favoured the potato, mainly because of the numerous ways the potato could be prepared and served. The potato can be boiled, fried or baked. I preferred my potato to be boiled then mashed and prepared with, pinch of salt, a lump of sun flower margarine and drop of milk and some grated cheese. I also enjoy the potato chopped up into long slices then fried. in the UK, we have fast food shops that sell them along side deep-fried cod, haddock or flounder in batter or breadcrumbs, I understand that thinly cut fried potatoes are sometimes referred to as French fries to distinguish them with the thickly cut ones, which are often referred to as chips. On really cold days while out shopping, I would often buy a baked potato wrapped in foil, with butter, and a choice of different fillings and toppings to help warm me up.

The potato rarely gets the praise or recordation of potential it deserves because the potato can be grown virtually anywhere in the world and is simple to grow, quick to mature, and requiring little water and with yields two to four times greater than that of wheat or rice. The potato is an environmentally friendly food crop that has a huge role to play in tackling food shortages and instability in low-come countries. A UN Food and Agriculture organisation initiative named 2008 the International Year of the Potato with the aim of changing all that.

I've been working in IT desktop support for several years and regard time between job roles as an ideal opportunity to expand on my skills. I tend to learn better in a hands-on environment rather than sitting in a classroom. I choose to build and designed my own websites so that I can show perspective employers of my new skills. While deciding on the topic of the first site, I choose to not to go for political discussion, which I enjoy, but decided instead to go for a theme based on food. This is because I wanted the project to be straight forward since food is something I am familiar with, and also I'm normally drained after a hard day's work and my projects should not take up most of my free time in maintenance and administration once they are built.

The Design

While preparing a meal, I came up with the idea of basing my first website on the potato. What could be complicated about explaining how to chit, plant, and grow potato crops? Or displaying potato recipes? Well I started with a blank page; I did not know where to start but was okay after I was able to find help in the form of videos on Youtube.com. I was able to decide on a name and kind of services the website would provide. The website was to be community based, a place where users meet up and get involved and hopefully help each other. I decided to incorporate a forum into the website. I also wanted to incorporate recipes and information on how to grow potatoes, and maybe some news and humor.

The original designs for the layout didn't make any sense because the chosen graphics looked technical and not relevant to food. I've found websites that specialised in royalty free photographs and graphics useful and believe these websites are a vital tool for website design and content. The tablecloth used in the website header came from one of those sites. I thought I spent too much time with the design for the layout and was not happy with the outcome but had to set time limits and had to stick with a colour scheme and graphics in order to progress to the next stage.

My original idea was include a few example of recipes and then hoped the more will come later via the forum, but to my surprise there are a lot of recipes in the public domain that are open source. At the time of discovery I was going to extract out and only keep the potato related recipes, but concluded that there was no point. The growing tips web pages of the project were more complicated. I had difficulty putting what I know down on paper, it was issues such as quantifying what I know to figures. I wanted to be able to refer to official sources concluded that no official body exists. In my frustration I called someone from the Potato Council who referred me to information they give to schools. In the end I had to write my growing tips section based on the middle ground from existing work. Material from Youtube.com was good, so I emailed the Youtube.com members and asked them if I could use their videos in the website, to which some said yes. What I also found useful from Youtube.com was the website could potentially pay for itself by use of Google Adsense. There is a lot of material on tube on the subject. My first website two approximately three weeks get online, but development is ongoing, I then discovered that I had to register the website to search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and then market the website. I have found the process interesting and very addictive. Spudlink.com was originally an educational project for me in order for me to learn about website design. I'm looking forward to my next project.

Thanks for reading.