About this Website
The how and why of the Computer Science Department website.
Frances Duncan
Adjunct professor of Computer Science
May 2010
The Computer Science Department website was redesigned in spring 2010 by the students in my Web Development II class. The class aimed to practically apply, with hands-on activities, the skills, techniques, and technologies we explored in Web Development I, with an emphasis on investigating some of the new features of CSS3.
From time to time, the class was conducted as if the students were participating in an agency redesign, with me acting as Project Manager and the department our client. We explored the then-current website, performing a casual in-class content audit, and used the results of this audit to determine the site navigation, design, and content needs. (Procuring that content ended up being another story altogether, as it often is…) The students proposed site outlines — or tables of contents — which we distilled together into one site map representing the new hierarchy of the site. Together, we used FTP software to create a directory structure for the site that would provide useful, meaningful URLs.
The class worked collectively to develop a hand-coded XHTML 1.0 Strict document that serves as a basic template for all the pages on the site, and I implemented and demonstrated some simple PHP that provides a way to work with dynamic content — changing page titles, highlighting navigation states, and including modular content.
For much of the semester, the students worked individually on unique style sheets that can be used to “skin” the website with various distinct “looks” reflecting the interests and skills of each student. You can explore some of the student style sheets by clicking on the Style Sheet Switcher tab in the upper-right corner of the site. The switcher is powered by jQuery, a lightweight, open-source JavaScript effects library.
One of the objectives of the redesign was to use progressive enhancement to provide a rich experience to users with modern browsers, while at the same time delivering functional, useful content and navigation to other users. As such, the style sheet switcher works only for JavaScript-enabled browsers. The default style sheet is meant to evoke the MCLA “brand”, respecting the conventions of the current iteration of www.mcla.edu while allowing for the use of more up-to-date practices and techniques. The student style sheets vary in their faithfulness to the brand, and are meant to be open-ended investigations of the topics we covered in class.
We look forward to the evolution of this site, and hope it serves to attract students to the Computer Science Department, and to MCLA in general. Please contact me at f.duncan@mcla.edu with any questions, comments, or criticisms.