‘ju:femaiz

I’ve also been doing a bit of web development at uni, in addition to the random goings on that have been occuring for friends. The Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering is being given a small facelift on the front, and an overhall at the back. I hope to have the CPVE website running on Textpattern soon, with the changeover period set for the Winter break from uni. The main problems faced are taking an existing (and woefully coded) website and bringing in web standards (X/HTML, CSS and WAI) to minimise potential legal action against the Centre over accessibility issues. So far the only *real* problem has been from Internet Explorer, though these have been minimal (experience helps when it comes down to designing sites to work in IE that are alse accessible and semantic).

Another job that I have picked up at the University is work for the Faculty of Science doing menial tasks of content management. For some odd reason the ‘people on the hill’ (also known as the uni’s manageement) thought it would be a good idea to contract a company (Interwoven) to create web-based software to handle the management of the content. This seems all good and well, and they have a slick ‘How To Use MyCMS’ manual, but its once you have to use it that you realise how absolutely appalling built the thing is. There’s no logic in how the systems work, and whoever was responsible for creating the output needs to be shot (not sure if that is UNSW, Faculty of Science or Interwoven) as it’s woeful (second time for the use of that word).