About this site
The design of this website has three main aims. Firstly, it aims to promote the work of the department through the use of images on every page. These images are chosen randomly from a selection, and can be added to by students and staff: see the Internal Homepage for futher details. The promotion of the work was to be set against a simplified background that nevertheless promotes the University of Bath's strong visual identity that can be seen in many places in the City of Bath -- namely the Sulis logo on a strong, plain blue background. This lead to the design of the header banner.
The second aim is to structure the information about the Department to facilitate access to relevant information quickly and easily. The site is organised into five areas that reflect the activities of the Department and its links with the outside world. You should be able to find your way around easily, but if not, please let us know so the design can be improved.
The third and equally important aim of the website design is to ensure the simplest and most efficient method of maintainance of the content. This lead to the use of a database driven technology, and CMSMS in particular. The result is the ability for any authorised person to edit content without needing programming skills. Thus the person responsible for a particular MSc Course can have editing rights to the pages that relate to his/her course, and can be responsible for keeping the data up to date. They can change what appears in the central column of the page, but cannot change the page design or layout.
This site is database driven, and uses CMS Made Simple to manage the content. CMSMS is an easy to use, well designed, content management system. The majority of information shown on this site is stored in the CMSMS database. However, the contact information (on some pages on the right) is obtained directly from the Universityof Bath's central LDAP contacts database system. Similarly, the lists of publications by individuals are read directly from the University's central Personal Information System (PIP).
Additional information about each person, such as Research Group, project page(s), role(s) in the department, their photograph, biography and other details for their individual pages, etc, is held in the ACE database. All the pages relating to people -- whether the Departmental Structure page, a Research Group's page (e.g. ), or an individual's personal page, is generated from this database. A change to a role, for example the Head of Department, means one change in the database to update all pages where the Head of Department is named.
The layout is controlled by CSS. As every browser interprets CSS differently, some variation in layout may occur. At present, this site works best if viewed using IE6, IE7, or Mozilla for Windows, or Safari for Windows or Macintosh.
Work on the site is currently in progress. The aim is to make viewing possible using Camino and Opera in the near future. Thank you for your patience.
This site was designed and created by Megan Yakeley.