Website: 2006

WBI is proud of its 2006 championship award winning website. Read on to find out more about it.

Webmasters

Students:

• Elaine - graphics, theming
• Ohm - HTML editor, content entering/editing, linguistic quality assurance
• Mohit - content entering/editing, content management, HTML editor
• Alex - Photography
• Kyle - some PHP scripting, HTML editor, content entering/editing
• More than a dozen other team members who wrote articles and supplied content

Mentors:

• Emil - Lead webmaster, PHP scripting, theme, graphics, content coordinator, quality assurance, forum administrator

How this Website Worked:

• Every web page was written in PHP.
• Most of the content was stored in a MySQL database. This made managing the site easier since the design and data were separated.
• The design (color, font, size, spacing, image effects, etc.) was written with CSS which provided a central place to change how everything was displayed.
• This site had many neat administration features hidden from normal users. Having these functions allowed administrators to quickly and easily modify content without touching any PHP code.

The Theme

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

The Menu

Menus were generated automatically by PHP script from an XML file using an XSL transformation. This is an example of how menuitems are defined:

<menuitem type="submenu" page="multimedia" text="Multimedia" url="multimedia" >
    <menuitem type="link" page="photos" text="Photos" url="photos" />
    <menuitem type="link" page="videos" text="Videos" url="videos" />
</menuitem>

Searching

The search was done by redirecting the search request from this website to Google and adding "site:boilerinvasion.org" to the end of the Google search. This told Google to only search pages within boilerinvasion.org.

Some of Our Guidelines

• The website must NOT be fixed size. If appropriate, pages resize to the size of your browser window. We also make sure pages do not get too wide. The minumum width we support is 800 pixels and the maximum is 1100 pixels.
• All web pages comply with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard. This helps make sure that any up-to-date browser will view the website correctly.
• Every page must be high quality to be presentable. This includes routinely checking for spelling and grammar errors.
• All PHP code must be secure. It is often much easier to write code that does not have to check data for security purposes but this can lead to large consequences later.
• The entire website must be editable through itself. Online file managers and database management utilities make it possible to edit any part of this website from anywhere in the world. All one would need is an internet browser and the administrator password.
• The website must have short, easy-to-read, and up-to-date content.
• Images are useful if used correctly. Pictures can provide visual cues and enrich the user's experience.
• No splash page. Though visually interesting, intro pages can slow down users' navigation. For users, especially students, who visit the site often, clicking through the intro page can be tedious.
• Optimize files and images for fast download. Every image, if offered in a smaller size than the original, must be thumbnailed. Many of our videos are offered in WMV format which currently has the best compression algorithm for media content.

Recommended Software

If you are looking for software to develop your website, we have some suggestions. These programs won't magically do everything for you, but we have found them to be very helpful.

• Adobe Dreamweaver - Rich and simple to use editor for HTML, PHP, CSS, and lots more.
• Adobe Fireworks - A very easy to use image editor. This program is a very effective solution for editing, compressing, and creating simple graphics.
• Adobe Photoshop - The classic image editor. Depending on how good you are at it, you can create anything from simple images to artistic masterpieces.
• GIMP - This open source graphics program is comparable to Photoshop but has the advantage of being free.
• Sony Vegas Video - A powerful and intuitive program for digital video editing.
• Microsoft Notepad - The guru webmaster's favorite text editor in Windows.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about the website, feel free to contact us.

Return