Last revised: 2009-03-19 by Alan Hogan. See all.
About Our Website
On this page:
Creation and Purpose
Mr. Myers, when he founded the club, also foresaw the need for and appropriateness of a club website. For this purpose he ensured that “webmaster,” or someone in charge of the website, was an officer position.
The website is used for various reasons, as described in our bylaws, including:
- Allowing club members to check up on upcoming meetings or other club activities
- Providing a place where anyone, member or not, may ask questions related to computers or technology
- Giving interested club members a hands-on, practical, real-life experience in good website design
The website itself was officially launched February first, 2005, by its first webmaster, Alan Hogan, who designed our content management system. The current webmaster will always be listed on the officers page.
Accessibility
We have worked hard to make our website accessible so anyone can easily use the information on our website, even if they are on a cell phone with no JavaScript, can’t use a mouse, or can’t even see.
To ease your use of our website, we have provided one-click links to change the font size and a consistent navigation list to the left.
Our site is completely 508 and WAI-AA compliant (priorities 1 & 2). We are mostly priority 3 compliant, too.
Our website is arguably
compliant with all WCAG priorities (WAI-AAA compliant). Some validators
will complain that some forms have no default “placeholder
text” (priority 3) but the official WAI recommendation says
this is only needed if user agents do not support initially
blank form fields. We are not aware of any browsers with
problems with empty <input> elements; however we added
default text to a lot of elements, but some still don’t
have any (for various reasons, such as the field is optional).
Secondly, we have very few keyboard shortcuts (accesskeys)
defined (“L” is log in, for example.)
Why not have more? We feel that there is no good
implementation of accesskeys, and they are not consistant
across websites; this adds dubious value when added to
a lone website such as ours. Instead, we made sure there was
a logical tab order and elements could be found via text
searches. (For example, home page link can be accessed by
typing
in
Firefox).
/home <enter>
Technologies Used
The website is different from many other sites in that each of its pages are not stored on a web server as ready-to-view .html files. Instead, our website uses a unique mix of PHP, MySQL, XHTML, JavaScript, “magic tags” and “skins” to keep server-side content files and information “pure” in the sense that there is no extraneous code for styling purposes. This has the added benefit of a “skinnable” website.
| Technology | Use |
|---|---|
| XHTML | Used for markup (document structure). |
| CSS | Style and formatting for the entire website – this keeps formatting completely separate from the actual document, greatly easing updates. |
| PHP | PHP is a scripting language our server uses to handle things like creating the navigation list, adding database integration, and handling log-ins. |
| MySQL | This is the technology we use for our database, which stores things like the title of this page and users’ usernames. |
| JavaScript | JavaScript is a scripting language that runs in your browser. We use it to do nifty things like letting you change the font size of this page without reloading it. |
Future Plans
There are a lot of useful functions that can be incorporated into the website thanks to the content/extras separation in the system we are using. These are some capabilities that I plan to add to the site.
- More tools for web-team members, such as a very easy-to-use content-creation tool that requires little or no HTML knowledge
- Site search - try this:
- RSS feeds for new content and newsletters – then anyone can add links to and descriptions of the latest content on ghscc.com to their My Yahoo page or an RSS aggregator
Newsletter notification emails (suggested by Mrs. Jean Pfaff)(Now Available)- Possibly, an inter-member message tool, e.g. for web-team collaboration
Privacy Policy
We feel that our privacy policy is very reasonable. Rest assured that none of your personal information will be sold to anyone, ever. Read the whole thing here.
Awards “Won”
While we do not recall entering this site in this contest, an anonymous tipster has informed us that this site site won the Golden Web Awards. (Take this announcement with a grain of salt.)