Website: WIDE World brochure
Role: Web developer; member of a four-person web project team
About the WIDE World brochure website
WIDE World is a distance learning organization based out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They offer teachers and other educators the opportunity to learn innovative teaching methods through a web-based course platform. This website acts as their online promotional brochure and course catalog.
Problems to solve
From a visual standpoint, the previous version of the site did not fully leverage its co-branding with Harvard Graduate School of Education. From a technical standpoint, it did not support the use of multiple languages well (problematic for marketing to English- and Spanish-speaking learners) and did not support content management consistently.
Programming and design details
- Full recoding using ColdFusion and XHTML with an emphasis on server-side form processing and error checking
- Cascading Style Sheets used for presentation; allowed for easy updates of colors and other display-related issues
- Emphasized Harvard branding through more prominent imagery and a color scheme aligned with Harvard’s colors
- Built and implemented a content management system for updating all content across the website; in addition to helping to support multiple languages, this allowed non-technical admins to make quick changes to content on the website without needing to contact the developers
- Technologies: ColdFusion, XHTML, SQL, CSS