UST Web Site Redesign

I was trying to check the University calendar on the UST Web site for the preliminary examinations schedule when I noticed the redesign and restructure planned for it has already been implemented. Excitedly, I saw some of the things I’ve dreamt of doing for it^[1] accomplished on the reboot.^[2]

These include:

• Porting the site from ASP to PHP; and,
• Complying with the XHTML 1.0 and the CSS 2 recommendations.

A very clean design added to its beauty and usability. And, scripting features that makes the layout fluid or fixed, as well as changing the font size according to the users’ preferences, made it more accessible. Two very good steps to have been taken, IMO.

I remember checking it a day after the said reboot, the news roller was a bit misaligned in Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari,^[3] but was rendered as desired in Internet Explorer 7. Now, four days later, after browsing it again to continue writing this post, I see they’ve already fixed the alignment problem for the major browsers with the exception of Safari/Win—now I have nothing to rant about the site being made with only IE anymore. Heh.

The new design also features compliance badges from W3C, which results to only a single markup error that is, IMO, fairly forgivable for an elaborate design and a complex site structure. That error may even be caused by the CMS^[4] itself for one of its modules automatically placing a <link /> to a style sheet wherever it was inserted.

I haven’t seen much improvement in a single reboot for the site as far as I could remember.^[5] The move to open source software, Web standards compliance, and accessibility with usability is, IMO, the best direction any Web site could have taken. Kudos to the Webmasters of the new UST Web site!

Footnotes:

1. ^ when I volunteered to be a TomasinoWeb member
2. ^ another term for redesign; from CSS Reboot
3. ^ all on the Windows platform
4. ^ namely, Joomla!
5. ^ with three designs, as of now