Visitors Logbook
To view a Live Demo click here.
A log of people visiting your business is a key tool. It is used by lots if different people and is an important record. Someone may have to make a pass for your visitor. Someone else may need to see visitor numbers to book the correct room. Someone else may have to review who was on site on a certain day.
A Visitors Log on your Intranet is therefore an ideal application. Putting it on the Intranet makes it visible to everyone and people know where it is. I was tasked with this project for a company once. The specification follows:
- Easy to use and fits the current Intranet design.
- Limited to one page.
- Time saving options.
As the company had a standard look to its intranet is was of course very easy to copy the design. I decided to go with a spilt screen design. The top half would be for input and the bottom half for display.
Input.
A simple HTML form would be enough to gather all the information required. So I asked the company what information they wanted to store. They answer was:
- Arrival Date
- Arrival Time
- Departure Date
- Name
- Company
- Area of Site Visiting
- Member of Staff Responsible
- Visitor or Contractor
- Parking Required
A key aspect of collecting data is deciding what type of input box to use. Although 9 text boxes may suit the requirements they are not the best option. Where it is possible to control input this is always the best option. This is partly about speed, but mostly about GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
By using tick boxes or drop down lists I was able to limit what staff could input. These are also time saving devices. A tick next to Parking is a lot quicker than someone typing. I also included a standard calendar on the date boxes.
The staff list was also a drop down which used their username to automatically populate. In the demo on this site the field is just a text box, for the oblivious reason I do not have a list of who visits this site!
Display.
The bottom half of the screen is spit into eight display boxes. One for each day and one to display details for the selected visitor.
There was a discussion about merging Saturday and Sunday, but the business decided they did not want that to happen.
Navigating Weeks.
With the previous Word based system a member of staff use to rename Word documents at the end of a week. So Next_Week.doc became This_Week.doc, and This_Week.doc became the week number and year. A blank document was then called Next_Week.doc. This system sometimes failed as people would forget to do the rename before leaving for the weekend. Also holidays were an issue as someone else was expected to remember. Members of staff only had a two week window to input and searching weeks was difficult.
Therefore in the centre of the new Visitors Log I put in the link options of Previous Week and Next Week. This allowed people to move forward and backwards as many weeks as they required. When the Log was first opened it took the system date and opened in the current week.