For an example of the sort of linking that I’m using it for, check out the Links post.

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.

I was looking for just this kind of a project because I wanted a reason to play with TinyMCE, an Open Source, platform independent, web-based JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor control, and SWFUpload, a small JavaScript/Flash library that does very neat things with file uploads.

The most difficult part was actually getting the templates to look good in a variety of browsers. Because the template HTML appears inside of a larger page, I couldn’t rely on Doctype switching to place IE into standards mode. This meant the templates would have to be developed so that they would look approximately the same in standards-compliant browsers like Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, as well as horrible browsers like IE6 in quirks-mode. I tried very hard to minimize the use of tables, but they eventually crept in. I was able to use CSS, for the most part, though if any more issues come up, I’m going to throw in the towel and just do inline styles.

The web app is open to the public, but realize that it’s very early in its development and I intend to continue making changes.

At some point, I would like to make it account-based, so that you can track usage statistics and such, but that will only happen after I’m confident that the thing will survive in the wild.

So, feel free to give it a whirl, but know that it’s still in development and that I’ll probably have to wipe the database a few more times before I get it just right.

A little personal aside: my wife doesn’t believe in IM, so when we’re both on our computers and she finds a site she wants me to look at, instead of IM’ing me a link, she’ll shorten it and then shout the code at me, 2L or AF or whatever.

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.