>This site is now available, in archival form, at http://liquidnitrogen.us/cmuphitau.<
This project was undertaken around August/September 2005 for my fraternity, Phi Kappa Tau. This represented my first serious foray into web design, and in some ways, a significant challenge. I went about it in the most logical way I knew how: I tried to recreate some of the techniques I’d seen the web techs at work doing.
I outlined on paper, first, some of the important things to include in the site, some of the things to avoid, my goals for the site, and did a rough sketch-up of what it might look like. Later, I started designing it in Photoshop, incorporating elements and tying things together. One
important capability of the new site was that it needed to be easy to update. I devised two separate systems to do this: First, main page news would be handled by WordPress, a blogging software. Second, the secondary pages would be static, but use a content page and a layout page. The layout page imported the content page, so to change the content, you just go to the appropriate file in the content folder. Inside was a simple table with the text for the page. Easy to update/maintain, and more difficult to screw up.
WordPress turned out to be trickier than I thought. It’s an all-encompassing package, with its own theme and layouts. It’s its own page, and by default, doesn’t render in a way that would be easily included into another page. So I had to find a stripped-down theme, and then customize it further to fit my particular needs. This meant PHP and CSS editing, neither of which I had experience with. It was tedious, but I eventually got it how I wanted.
Another fun feature I implemented were two images on the left side. When the page went to load each image, it ran a script that randomly picked one from a specified directory. So each time the page was loaded, two new pictures showed up. Users found this to be fun, so I eventually allowed them to view the entire list of images that could be polled. A caveat: since each image was polled individually, there was a chance the same one could be chosen twice. A friend helped me write a script to fix this issue, but at some point I lost it. I did some math, though, and the more images I added, the more quickly the chance that the same one was grabbed twice reduced to a negligible amount. As the amount of images got above about 40, duplicates almost never arose.
The Phi Tau page also incorporated a Photo Gallery. Actually two of them. One was password-protected, so that members and friends maintained some degree of privacy, while the other was open to anyone and was more PR-oriented to show more the good things we do and less of the goofing off. The galleries were provided by a nice package called SPGM. However, getting it to fit the theme I had created once again required CSS editing, and some degree of easy config editing (it was well-documented). But the gallery was easily worth it. When I left, I had put over 2000 pictures on it, and it was one of the main attractions of the site, both with members of the fraternity and friends of it.
The Phi Tau site may not be the most elaborate around, but it was very well received among my friends, and it’s something I’m proud of. My successor has redesigned it since I left, but I’ve uploaded an archived copy I had here, and done some modifications so that it -mostly- works. For instance, the color of the WordPress feed on the main page is wrong, now–it was changed in the redesign. It’s available at http://liquidnitrogen.us/cmuphitau.
