Physical Plant Website Museum
Welcome to the Physical Plant Homepage Museum. The OSU Physical Plant has
maintained a presence on the Internet since early 1994, and
has gone through several metamorphoses. This page is a little
archive of the history of our website.
The first incarnations of the Physical Plant website were not
much more than single pages with text-only descriptions. There were no
regular project photos, although images were occasionally uploaded.
Unfortunately, no images of these early sites are available. |
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This "Webman-ified" version of the site came online in around April of 1998.
It was developed by our first student webmaster and featured a little marquee
that brought you any new information. |
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The second version came online in the summer of 1998. It featured a large
animated imagemap that was used for navigation. The large size of this
imagemap eventually led to a redesign of the homepage. |
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The third version of the site opened at the end of the summer
of 1998 to praise for ease of use and simple design. It had two
sets of small navigation buttons and a whirling OSU PP logo.
Through it, Webman kept you notified of recent site updates
and let you jump directly to Breaking News. |
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The fourth version of the site came online in October of 1998.
It featured a simple, classy design that contained an animated
image of the Halloween/Homecoming orange fountain. This
version gave instant access to the newest information and
looked good on any resolution. |
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The fifth version of this site came online in early 1999.
It removed the somewhat intrusive top and bottom buttons
and replaced them with a simple navigation bar at the top.
The site was updated with several JavaScript utilities,
but still ran fine on non-Javascript browsers. The Javascript
allowed for constant updates of the site with minimal effort. |
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The sixth version of this site has become very cross-browser
friendly. Coming online in May of 1999, it was very easy to
navigate with a lot of standardization throughout the enitre
site. A theme finally propagated the entire site-structure. |
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Webmaster Jeremy Corff redeveloped the site. By Summer 2001, the black background
design gave way to white, and a new color scheme arrived. Links were initially
confined to the top bar, but eventually the green "tickets" were added
down the left side. |
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The goal of the seventh homepage design was to simplify much of the
site. The colors were toned down to favor mostly earthy colors,
and the main page featured a rotating central image displaying current
Physical Plant projects. The navigation board at the top was easier to
use and understand by implementing as a 3-tier JavaScript menu.
The site relied heavily on Cascading Stylesheets and JavaScript
to propagate its look and feel. |
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In 2005, OSU took a more active interest in the web designs
created by departments across Stillwater campus. In an effort
to conform to the newly redesigned OSU website, Physical Plant
redesigned its website to give much the same look and feel as
the main OSU website. This included adding a QuickLinks bar,
albeit with added features such as "Smart Drop Down Lists",
as well as a Google search field. In addition, the employees'
information portal was rechristened "myPlant" and
given a prominent place on the page. Other goals included
ensuring non-IE browsers could view the website with little
trouble. |
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In 2006, OSU surprisingly deployed a new campus web site design.
Physical Plant quickly complied with the new design, and found it to
be very well developed. We continued with back-end programming tasks
and focused on delivering web pages that were more DOM-driven and browser independent.
Physical Plant relies on PHP to deliver our dynamic content. |
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