What are we working on this May?

Now that the Winter term is over, we’ve started looking at some core aspects of the RC site.

On the boring side (if any of this isn’t boring to you, let me know!), I updated quicklinks, search, and some other code on EVERY SINGLE PAGE of the RC site.

Particularly interesting: we’ve switched to Google for searching the site, so hopefully you will get real results when you search now.

We’re also thinking of changing the navigation soon. Here’s what it looks like now:

This is what the new style would look like:

I think the second is a lot more readable. You can also tell where on the site you are with the indentation.

Eventually, we MIGHT move those top-level links (Home – Future Students – Current Students – etc) into a bar that stretches horizontally across the top of the page, instead of being on the left-hand side. The navigation for each section will stay on the left. The rationale is: having the links across the top would put more stress on the sub-navigation, and would also free up more space on the left-hand side. But this is still a MIGHT — it’s just an idea for now.

On the big changes front, we’re moving to a new web host at the University. That means we’ll have access to a new set of tools — PHP, MySQL, Python, and the software that they allow. That will (hopefully) make posting updates and events a lot easier. There probably won’t be any large visual changes associated with that move.