Site Credits & Information

Site Creation
The School of Media Arts & Design website was designed and created by Professor Steve Anderson in December 2006 and January 2007. The updated site attempts to comply with Web Standards, separating structure from design and behavior. As much as possible, layout was achieved via Cascading Style Sheets or CSS.

Support for positioning via CSS is inconsistent across browsers and support is only partial or buggy in Internet Explorer 6 for the PC. (Problems mainly crop up with increased margin-widths and "overflowing" content in IE 6). One online forum, sponsored by Incutio, was particulary helpful in finding workarounds (hacks) for IE 6. See the posts here:
http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/28837 (margin-width hack)
http://archivist.incutio.com/viewlist/css-discuss/78037 (overflow hack)
http://webdesign.about.com/od/internetexplorer/a/aa082906.htm (hiding styles for IE 6 with child selectors)
http://24ways.org/2005/avoiding-css-hacks-for-internet-explorer (more on using child selectors)

Support for CSS is much better in Internet Explorer 7, but all of these pages should render just fine in either 6 or 7.

Screen Width
While most sites are currently constrained to somewhat less than 800 horizontal pixels (to fit on 800 X 600 resolution displays), a growing number of websites are designed for the increasing use of higher resolution displays. This site attempts to conform to that trend and is maximized for the wider 1,024 X 768 displays with a horizontal resolution of about 970 pixels. (According to one source, the number of computers operating at 800 X 600 display resolution was only around 17% in July 2006, and falling).

True, many computer users (especially Mac users) will not have their browsers fully maximized and the site's width will cause the dreaded horizontal scrollbar to appear. However, the site's essential content is contained exclusively within a much narrower left-hand portion of the screen. (Only the site's promotional "billboards" are on the right of the screen). This is an approach being taken by a growing number of websites including The New York Times, WashingtonPost.com, CNN.com and ESPN.com.

Software and Applications
The site was created with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver 8. Two sections of the site (Alumni and Jobs & Internships) were written in the PHP scripting language to allow user/administator input and dynamic page creation from a MySQL database.

Photographs
A number of the large "rotating" photographs on the home page were shot by SMAD student Brett Lemon in the Fall of 2006. Photo treatments were created by Steve Anderson.

Special thanks to SMAD's previous director, Professor George Johnson, for his support of this effort. Thanks also to Professor Dona Gilliam for maintenance of the Jobs & Internships section.