Research Day 2005 Friday, May 6th GCA Website Project Keith Bodie Janis Archer

5/6/05 GCA Website Project The Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel High School is a private girls’ high school located in White Plains, NY Throughout its more than 80 year history, the school has embraced values of:  Academic excellence  Service  Compassion  Diversity  Leadership The students, faculty, administration, alumnae, parents and friends form a community in support of these values.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Communication and connection are essential for keeping this community thriving and growing The school’s needs have outgrown a static, student- oriented website developed in 1998 The goal  to design and build a more dynamic site  targeted for a broader audience  that communicates a growing technical savvy  without losing sight of the values and traditions that define the school’s character.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project The solution provides a single location where information needs of the entire GCA community can be served while fostering connectedness within and among the diverse constituents. The website needed to be easy to navigate for the sophisticate and novice alike and have a professional and appealing look and feel.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project In order to accomplish these goals, a consistent design was used throughout the site along with a pop up menu that allowed any page of the website to be reached by a single mouse click. In order to support the dynamic content essential for a truly effective website, a user-friendly mechanism for staff and faculty to update web content was created.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project First, the Header and Footer were designed.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project The Navigation Menu was designed and implemented in JavaScript, granting access to any page with a single mouse click.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project The site contains a mixture of content pages which are static, partly dynamic or fully dynamic. A MySQL database is used as the repository for the dynamic portion of the content. In all, there are 5 different types of pages in the website:  Static pages  Dynamic List Pages  Dynamic Field Pages  Dynamic Table Pages  Dynamic Calendar Pages

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Static Pages are simple HTML and are not updateable without actually changing the code. This type was chosen for pages that are not likely to change often.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Dynamic List Pages have content that appears as a series of bullet points. The actual content is extracted from a database.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project The Site Administration is password protected and easily navigated. Authorized users can add, edit or delete line items in a page’s list.

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5/6/05 GCA Website Project Dynamic Field Pages consist primarily of static content with a few updateable fields interspersed

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Dynamic Table Pages allow the user to update tabular content. Single and multiple level tables are accommodated. The Library > Research Help page requires a multi- level dynamic table.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project First, the user specifies categories of research and the order in which these categories are to appear.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Then, the user enters the resources within each category.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project The result is a webpage which displays a large volume of information in a well organized manner and provides the user with exceptional flexibility.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Dynamic Calendar Pages provide the user with a calendar and a viewable schedule of events. Each calendar has its own instance for event recording in the database.

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5/6/05 GCA Website Project Links are provided to other important sites.

5/6/05 GCA Website Project PDFs are available for download

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Information is solicited, encouraging two-way communication

5/6/05 GCA Website Project Broadcast capability is provided

5/6/05 GCA Website Project And for the future…???  More photos  More editable content  Access to the library card catalog  Alumnae chat room  On-line application submission  Accept tuition payments  On-line bookstore

5/6/05 GCA Website Project