 |
 |
NCVCBiT Group
WCTS
Experiments
|
|
 |
|
Whitman College Technology Services
Summer 1999
Note: I'm trying to locate a copy of the old screenshot after my hosting company went under. Please bear with me. - 4.6.03
Another
major overhaul, I was asked to redesign the site for Whitman's technology
services department. The previous site was much simpler, and I was hoping
to do something visually interesting and different with this site. There
was very little creative direction given, and the only real requirements
were that pages be easy enough to maintain that our CTO could change
them with a text editor.
Skills, Technologies, Etc.
HTML, Perl-based CGI, Javascript, SSI (and lots of 'em)
My Role:
Lead Designer, Developer
Results:
The design I ended up going with was very vaguely based on an early iteration of Glassdog.com that I liked, using an interesting framed-page effect. After developing an HTML prototype of the page, though, it became clear that the page would be difficult to edit with a text editor. A WYSIWYG editor would have been ideal to allow department members to make changes to the site, but most preferred to use a text editor.
The solution was to build each page out of a series of Server Side Includes, making each actual page little more than actual text and the includes. Considering that the alternative would have been sifting through layers of nested tables to find commented text areas, it worked very well. Additionally, because this site was directed solely at the campus, and it's fast connections, we had no concerns about performance hits caused by all the includes.
The resulting site was one that was easy to edit, and visually interesting. In fact, it one a design award - First prize of the "Computer Services Website: small institution" category at the 1999 ACM SIGUCCS competition for university publications. The department has since redeigned again, this time looking to go very simple, as well as reflect the look and feel of the main college site. It's mostly a visual redesign though, so you can get a feel for the architecture and content, much of which I wrote during the development process.