Technology behind the CoA site

 

As the Web matures into a robust, content-rich, information delivery medium, the technologies that support the Web become increasingly more powerful and complex. Georgia Tech relies on several hardware and software solutions to ensure the relevance and reliability of this site.

Hardware

The Georgia Tech College of Architecture Web site is served by an HP Proliant DL380 server running an Apache web server.

Software

Most of the pages in this site were built using Macromedia Dreamweaver, with every effort taken to ensure standards compliance and accessibility.

Additionally, many pages rely on PHP scripting to deliver content from an databases, such as the Calendar, News and Directory listings. PHP is a scripting language that gets processed on the server side, so that pages are delivered as standard HTML. It is open source and a project of the Apache Software Foundation (we also run the Apache Web server).

Standards and Concepts

Throughout the development and ongoing maintenance of this site, every effort has been made to ensure that every page is compliant with World Wide Web Consortium standards. All of our pages are now using a transitional XHTML document type, with level 1 Cascading Style Sheets to control presentation. Tables are strictly employed to organize data, as intended.

This site is built in a modular fashion, with reusable fragments of PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript stored as modules and dynamically loaded into the pages.

Some of the Scripts we used....

For our top, horizontal menu > Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns

For our left, vertical menus > Tree Menu Magic

For the expandable/contractable links on our FAQ pages > easyFAQ - a great little Dreamweaver extension

To print out the destination URL's of a link when you print a page > Footnote Links

On our home page, the nifty clickable slide show came from > BarelyFitz Designs