Anna Maria College is a private, not-for-profit, Catholic liberal arts institution accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. In addition to the various undergraduate and graduate programs and courses offered at its campus in Paxton, Massachusetts, AMC offers undergraduate and graduate programs online to reach the most diverse group of students possible.

Anna Maria College Online currently offers three degree programs online: a M.S. in Emergency Management, a M.A. in Fire Science and a B.S. in Fire Science.

The master’s in Emergency Management is one of the oldest and most well-established of its kind in the country. The master’s in Fire Science is intended for experienced firefighters, officers, fire chiefs, and other fire-service professionals who may need a master’s degree to be considered for a promotion or entry into management and high-level positions. The bachelor’s in Fire Science is for students who are preparing for an entry-level career in fire service and safety.

This was the first site that I developed since installing the Page Speed Firebug plugin, and I have tried to really improve on page load times. The site uses optimized images, a single minified JavaScript, and a single CSS file with 0 very inefficient rules, 3 inefficient rules, and 0 potentially inefficient uses of :hover out of 165 total rules. I’ve also paid greater attention to the order of my includes so as to not restrict parallelization, described in more detail in this video about Properly including stylesheets and scripts. So, I’m pretty pleased with its performance.

Lewis University is a regionally accredited, non-profit university that offers 80 undergraduate majors and programs of study, 22 graduate programs, and accelerated programs for working adults. Lewis University also provides highly respected online master’s degrees in addition to its traditional, campus-based programs. The Lewis University Online project involved developing a new site detailing three of these online programs: Master of Science in Public Safety Administration, Master of Science in Information Security, and Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership.

In terms of on-page SEO, I was able to insert a good number of meaningful heading tags. In this case, though, the copy I was provided contained headings that naturally followed an outline structure, so there aren’t many headings on the site that exist solely for presentational purposes and all of the headings are followed by either a direct subheading or at least one paragraph of body text.

The most interesting part of this project, developmentally, was a Flash-like slide show thing that actually uses script.aculo.us’ Effect.Move. It’s so smooth and graceful that the designer and I just kept referring to it as ‘the Flash thing’ to keep it simple.