Western Michigan Chapter of ARMA

Website

Site no longer active.

As a member and the volunteer webmaster for the Western Michigan chapter of ARMA, it was an interesting and somewhat challenging project to re-design the website for the chapter. Obviously, cost was a major concern. As it was a volunteer project, external and costly scripts and software could not be integrated into the website, and due to the wide variety of our users, the site had to be widely accessible.

The coding of the site was also heavily optimized to increase search engine and human accessibility, as well as ease of maintenance. The lines of code were reduced by 70%. That is a significant reduction in bandwidth, enabling the site load faster.

Case Study

Benefits of the redesign of the Western Michigan ARMA chapter website:

• The code has been rewritten utilizing CSS to perform more efficiently, and has reduced the lines of code by an average of 70%. For example, the original home page had 277 lines of code and was 19kb, while the new home page has 76 lines of code and is 4kb. This greatly enhances the speed at which the page loads, and also reuses various common parts of each page.
• Each common element that is used across multiple pages has been rewritten to be used on an object basis, which means that, instead of including the same piece of information in the code of each page, each page simply references an external file which houses the common object. This allows for more efficient use of bandwidth, and also minimizes maintenance activities. For example, the menu on the left hand side of the screen is a separate file called menu.html. Each page of the site calls the menu.html file to include its contents into the parent page, instead of that code being physically written into every page. Needless to say, when updating a menu link, it is much more preferable to update in one file versus every page of the site.
• Because of the new coding structure, the site will be more search engine friendly, as well as be more accessible to those with disabilities.
• The menu system has been moved from a dynamic menu at the top of the screen, where each individual link was accessible through an hierarchical system, to a text based list of links on the left hand side of the screen where every page in the site is visible without having to search for it.
• A significant reduction in hosting costs.
• A significant improvement in our website statistics.