Website: 2010

Our 2010 Website

Expecting Nothing Less than Excellence

Our 2010 website was created around our motto "nothing less than excellence." We had high expectations for our website in order to work towards our goal of winning a website award.

Students

• Hiroshi: Leader of Website Team, PHP Coding, Media
• David: All Things Calendar, PHP Coding
• Jonathan: Media Manager, Content Editing
• Subhav: Visual Design, Javascript, Mobile Website
• Raghav: XHTML Validation, Content Editing
• Devan: Content Editing, Graphic Design
• Max: Content Editing, Photos, Misc.

Mentors

• Jason Stevens
• Mike Wolfer

How We Did It

• Every page was generated through PHP.
• All content was stored in a MySQL database for a highly dynamic website.
• Extensive CSS was used so every page looks uniform and continuous.
• Hand coded content management system was hidden to general users, which allowed for administrators and team members to easily edit and manage content.
• Adoption of newer web standards for more advanced functionality

The Theme

The gold and fluid theme represented the main color of Purdue University, our biggest sponsor and local university.

The Menus

The menus were generated from the MySQL database and put to use through the use of a recursive PHP function on the backend and javascript on the browser to enhance the display of the menus. Each menu item had an id, name, and parent id. The parent id pointed to another menu item which the current item would be listed under, this allowed us to freely create an infinitely deep nested menu system with no changes to the database or PHP code.

The Guidelines

• All pages must be compliant to XHTML1.0 Strict. Feel free to test any of our pages and let us know any that we have missed. A link can be found at the bottom of every page.
• All PHP pages must be secure. More often than not, securing PHP pages complicates code and requires extra time, but if pages are not secure, there may be serious consequences for our website and others hosted on our shared server.
• All pages must be editable by authorized team account using a simple interface. For the ease of the non-coders on the team, it must be easily editable using a familiar interface. This year, our content management system closely resembled a the Microsoft Word 2003 interface. Anyone familiar with Microsoft Word could easily update and add content.
• No splash page. While they may be visually appealing to users, it can also cause confusion in navigation and increase the amount of data users must download to see content.
• All pages must be compressed and optimized before the server sends the page to the user's browser. A user’s web experience is tremendously enhanced if the user does not have to wait long periods of time before a page loads.
• The website must be accessible by the widest possible audience. This includes all major browsers and some less popular ones as well. This website supports Internet Explorer 5+, Firefox, Mozilla, Chrome, Safari, and many more. For mobile devices, we offer a slimmed down copy of the website with the option to view the full website. Nearly every page is supported by screen readers for those with visual impairments.
• When possible, users should be able to customize the website to their liking. Multiple themes are available for users to change the look and feel of the website, and when logged in, users get customized calendars.