Martin's BCIM Website Blog

 
A lot has happened since I created this early draft of our new external website (July 2004). I thought it would be good to start my 2005 blog entries with a summary of what I think have been the key developments since that early draft...

1. After several iterations I arrived at this first official prototype, which I presented to the Dean and Pro-Deans (Chris, Geoff and Roger).
    
2. I then developed matching banners for the StaffWeb, StudentWeb and Timetables websites. I converted all the StaffWeb pages to the new format, while Mike converted the StudentWeb and Timetables pages. Mike also completely re-structured the StudentWeb after discussions with Janet L. (Student Support Officer).
    
3. We felt that we needed some input from a professional graphic designer for our external home page. Here is the suggested home page from Ariadne Designs, which we received at the end of November. They also presented us with this alternative home page, and this suggested sub-page. We may use the alternative home page for the July-August-September recruitment season.
    
4. Here is the revised prototype that I created based on the artwork we received from Ariadne. I decided to change their proposed banner design for these reasons. In particular, I felt it was important to integrate "breadcrumbs" within the banner, as shown in this example sub-page.
    
5. Here is an example to show my suggested BCIM Associated Site style, which could be useful for research centres etc.
    
6. I created a focussed Google search facility using JavaScript to add additional search terms (e.g. "site:www.lsbu.ac.uk bcim" to those entered by the user. This provides a simple but generic solution that we can re-use to create quasi-customised search options as appropriate - as explained here.
    
7. I completely re-wrote the expiry checker using PHP4 and XML; the new version incorporates various improvements over the original version.
    
8. Mike has developed a staff listing script to provide consice tabular output similar to what we used to have in the SCISM website. (I'll write up something about that soon.)
    
9. James has developed a way of incorporating neat pop-up windows within a web page, enabling this (prototype) Announcement Archives StaffWeb page. Getting it to be cross-brower compatible proved to be quite hard! Here is James' blog about this work (LSBU-access only).

I have put together a set of pages for all of the undergraduate courses within the Computing Programme, and Mike is now doing the same thing for all of the BIT Programme pages. I have also prepared a prototype ISIT Dept page based on material from Peter Linecar and others, and I have prepared a few other pages - e.g. the "ABOUT" page, the "Contact Us" page and the "Maps" page. I feel that we have done about as much as we can do as far as creating the shell for the new website is concerned. Now we need to liaise with the other Heads of Departments and (especially) the other Programme Directors to ask them for input for their pages. The speed of development from now on will depend largely on how quickly we can get the necessary material for conversion into web pages.

We are also still waiting on John H for:

• corporate home pages
• self-select user passwords for the mailing list system.

I've been in contact with John periodically about both of these outstanding requirements. It seems that he's been very busy, and so has not been able to complete this work as quickly as he would have liked.