The Computer Society has had many versions of this website. The latest generation incorporates the latest design and technology of today, without the fluff of many sites that choose to use Shockwave or Java or JavaScript, and still get a pleasant browsing experience as well as information.

We spent a few weeks in October 2001 trying to decide on a new design for the website. We had a few requirements of a design:

1. It must use tables. Absolutely no frames allowed.
2. It must be mostly HTML 4.01 Transitional and/or CSS2 compliant, and not require too much work on our part to make it that way.
3. It must look clean and easy to read.
4. It must be easy to break up into pieces to "componentalize" it.

With these goals in mind, we had a look at Open Source Web Design, a nifty website which allows web developers to post their design work and comment on others. It's also a great place to pick out a design for your website! We eventually ended up choosing this one. Then on a lazy Saturday some of us migrated part of the content from the old webpage to it. The next day we used mod_perl on our Apache webserver in conjunction with HTML::Mason to reduce the size of the site by about 70% and centralize the common parts. This was made possible by the componentalizable property of the design we chose. We've also been able to easily make the transition from HTML 4.01 Transitional to XHTML 1.0 Transitional very easily because of this component-based model.

Here's our TODO list:

1. Convert all the old CGI scripts to use Mason. Examples are the resources page, which currently is driven by two CGI scripts. Another example are the Mailman-managed pages like this or this.
2. Convert more content from the old website.

Check out our website's code here.