Austin Chapter of SIAM website redesign

I finally got around to redesigning U.T.'s SIAM chapter website. I've been meaning to do it for months. The suitable effective kick in the pants was needing a site to house information for our upcoming student conference.


All in all I'm happy with it. I used

• some simple Dojo loaded via Google's AJAX hosting,
• a little Blueprint,
• lifting/revising content from both Pearl Flath's older chapter site and the official SIAM pages, and finally
• my feeble Inkscape logo design.

My three major complaints with my own work are:

The back button is broken.

I spent two hours futzing with dojo.back to get the back button to work. After I had it working, hitting back and then forward caused an infinite loop on page refresh. I gave up for now.

None of the content can be indexed by a search engine (I think).

Since all of the major content is loaded via dijit.layout.ContentPane.setHref fired with onClick events, I doubt a search engine can effectively index much of it. Something to check when I roll Google Analytics into the next update.

I have raw email addresses in mailto links.

I'm not sure how much server-side processing is permitted on this particular host. I need to move contact functionality into forms guarded by CAPTCHAs. Hopefully GMail's filter will save me in the meantime.

None of these are terrible to fix. They just take time. And classes began today...