In the summer of 2007 we were hired to preform some simple HTML cleanup on a series of sites for The University of Rochester's School of Nursing. The goal was to take the existing sites developed by a third party in Dreamweaver and cleanup up the HTML so it was valid HTML, displayed the same across multiple browsers (Firefox, IE 7, IE 6, IE 5.5 and IE 5.0), fix any layout glitches, use proper image file types and compression to ensure high quality images that load quickly, and using javascript to dynamically hide and show certain blocks of text.

Highlighted Features:

Scripting Language & Database Migration

One of the sites we worked on needed to be migrated from PHP with a MySQL database backend to Perl with a PostgreSQL database backend.
PHP is a server side scripting language meaning, among other things, it can be embedded into a HTML page. Perl is not, in fact it's pretty much the opposite, you can embedded HTML in a Perl script. So migrating from one to the other can be a bit of a challenge. Templates and custom Perl modules were created and used to make Perl emulate the embedded functionality of PHP.

Also, MySQL and PostgreSQL are similar but different database systems. While both follow the SQL standard, there are subtle differences between the languages and functions.

At the end of the project the pages and backend preformed the same functions but the code and backend database were quite different. And due to the way this was implemented the users did not see the differences, the site acted and appeared the same way it always had.

HTML Cleanup

The five sites were originally created with Dreamweaver but in order to meet validation and accessibility standards the sites needed to be adjusted to remove any extra tags added by Dreamweaver, fix any HTML validation issues, and fix slight alignment issues where text was not lining up or was shifting position slightly across multiple pages.



Roll over the image above to see how the menu was shifting positions across different pages.

Image Optimization

One of our tasks was also to redo the images for the site. All the images on the site were done as GIFs, which resulted in some large file sizes with very lossy images for photos. By using the appropriate image type in the appropriate situations we were able to minimize the loss in the quality while still maintaining a small filesize that would make the page load quickly. An example of one of the images is below. The first image is the new image while the second was the old image which is roughly two times larger in filesize.


New Image: JPG, 35K

Old Image: Gif, 75K