IDIA 618 Dynamic Web Sites

Review 2 - U. of Baltimore

David Pepper

The university of Baltimore's web site is located at http://www.ubalt.edu/. The site features a kind of fueding relationship between 2 major navigations -- vertical (left), and horizontal, as well as another briefer nav at the top of the page.

The left nav's organization is based on the school's internal structure, and it has a direct legacy to earlier versions of the website. Clicking into it unfolds a seried of nested layers which seem to go up to three layers deep. I see no overt evidence in viewing the source that the top level of the left nav is dynamically generated, but my general feeling is that it probably is, particularly because of the complexity of the nested layers.

The horizontal nav is established by a flashy animated menu which seems to have been designed around the idea of rotating assets that are highly volitile. It is organized around the idea of chuting the visitor into channels that answer the question: "who are you". Like the left nav, it tends to persist deep into the site (in the form of an HTML version of the same nav, but eventually drops out. The horizontal nav was introduced in Spring '06 as part of a web site redesign.

It seems likely to me that both navigations are dynamically generated, and in fact that the menus represent the greatest investment in dynamicness (sic) accross the site. It seems likely that there are or will be a set of tools to help people maintain these navigation-related assets (i.e. navigation data), which are linked to largely static templates. URL variables are used as the way to connect the navigational links to content pages and there is almost no hierarchical information embedded in the url. I have mixed feelings about this because it ignores a place users routinely look for information and may use or seek to use as an interface to the site.

Like the SPSBE site, I suspect that the database and custom applications are not used to index the site, and that ColdFusion's built in indexing features are used to crudely index the pages of the site and build the kind of results that are in evidence if you submit "MBA" to the search feature. I can imagine the Business school exerting pressure in the future to priviledge certain results from a search like that.

I picked this site because it is the next step in an evolution in content management systems. Like the others in my list, it is mainly about publishing text-based information.