About the website

In 2005 University College Falmouth commissioned the web technology company altcom Limited to provide a content management driven website that would allow the University to address a range of needs and users, and provide a powerful communications and marketing tool.  Working closely with the University's Marketing and web team, altcom still provides maintenance and web development services.

At the heart of a successful website is content. Keeping websites up to date and fresh is a challenge so the content management system had to provide user friendly tools that were accessible using only a web browser by non-technical content providers and editors.

Content Management

To ensure a balance between ease of submission and content quality, the system had to provide work-flow control and author permissioning in a way that could accommodate departmental authors, section editors, publishers, managers and Administrators. This helps keep the content flowing by making it easy to submit, edit and publish items, but also provides sufficient control to ensure that quality and standards are maintained.

Future-proofing

The website solution delivered by altcom needed to be extensible and modular so that there was a reasonable degree of 'future-proofing'. History has shown that no institution can anticipate every future requirement it may have, so a standards compliant system that was open to code modification and extension by internal staff and third parties was selected.

The content management system also needed to allow re-designs to be easily implemented.  By using technologies such as XHTML and CSS separation of code, content, structure and styling was possible.  This meant re-designs could be created and applied without excessive effort.  Since a new Prospectus is designed each year, synchronising the website design with the Prospectus has become an annual event.

Accessibility 

Accessibility to all groups of users is important to the University and the site follows the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Accessibility Guidelines for Level A throughout and Level AA on most pages.  A high contrast version of the site is available and the site has been tested with screen readers.

Open Source 

The other significant feature of the University's content management system website is that it makes extensive use of Open Source technologies. altcom's web development team are Zend Certified PHP engineers and the company is keen to promote the use of open source technologies where appropriate, particularly in the public/third sector. The University primarily uses proprietary technologies so the use of open source for such a high profile website was an innovative and courageous step by the University management which has worked out well.

For the technically minded the content management website solution altcom delivered is derived from Joomla! CMS  with numerous additional modules and core modifications, all written in PHP with a MySQL database. The website code runs on an Apache 2.0+ webserver located (from Feb 2009)  on a Rackspace linux server.  XHTML and CSS are used throughout along with some JavaScript and Flash elements.