Integrated Web Services

Our clients in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering had a website that hadn’t been reorganized or updated in several years. It didn’t showcase the school’s world-class faculty and research; it didn’t meet the University’s identity guidelines; it could only be updated by one programmer.

Unique, Innovative Design

We were asked to come up with an all-new design that was identity compliant, but unique and innovative. In particular, it should not be “boxy” or look too much like any existing Cornell sites. It should be colorful, include graphics that are both visually stunning and evocative of the mathematical elegance found in Operations Research, and accommodate widely-varying page lengths and dynamically-generated, many-level navigation.

The white Cornell banner and background create a generous sense of space, while the images, font, and subdued color palette emphasize the theme of modern sophistication. Our client provided us with a very rich portfolio of images (and even animations) to use, including research images provided by the school’s faculty, which contribute a very distinctive feel to the site.

Automatically-Generated Navigation

Large websites require a navigation scheme that gives users all the information they need about where they are in the site, without listing every page, and that’s easy to maintain as pages are added or removed.

Code developed for this site (and subsequently used in several others) constructs the left-column navigation links, “breadcrumb” links, site map, and page title text dynamically. The link display expands and contracts to “follow” your movement through the site: you can always see to the top of the site, the main sections, and the pages above, below, and beside the one you’re on.

Managed Elements

In this website, IWS pioneered the use of form-based interfaces to make it easier for clients to enter, modify, and remove standard-format data such as directory entries or news items. These management interfaces are now a standard offering on our sites.

A Dedicated Client Project Manager

This project benefited from having a single client project manager who had a clear vision of what was wanted and good communications with both IWS and the faculty of the school.

Video Lectures

For this website, IWS developed a new Flash utility that makes it fairly simple and relatively inexpensive to present high-performance video segments with coordinated illustrations.

These are used to showcase lectures by the School's faculty on their groundbreaking research.

Under Budget

Design and Development of this website came in 11% under the budgeted cost.