Delta Tau Delta

Website Design and Build

March 2000

MIT has its freshmen pledge before they begin classes. I came to Delts because of a friend's brother and thoroughly enjoyed it. The first class I took at MIT was Keeping Pace with the World Wide Web, which I immediately enjoyed because the web became my new medium to work in.For a class project, I decided to design the fraternity web page in order to help with the Rush Recruitment.

The main problem with our Historian's photos is that they were all taken in black and white. At the time, I did not know exactly how to colorize photos, so I decided to make a site that came across with professionalism utilizing black and white photography.

The delt site was launched and the professors also approved of the work. The site also had the professors mention their own personal projects to me and asked if I'd like to be a part of it (The Shakespeare Electronic Archive). This version of the site lasted for a while, but would later be redone by me. The time came to redo the site and add some color and information to it. I had learned a lot and was getting the hang of Dreamweaver. The web site turned from a 'just me' project into a team project. I managed the team: our Rush chair wrote up the content, our Historian took photos I requested, and I built the site.

The other factor to take into consideration was that the site was hardly going to be updated by anyone, so the design had to be generic enough to last for a few years until another redesign; however, a few sections must be easy to edit, such as Current Officers, Meet the Brothers, etc. The design has been in use since March of 2000 and had won an award for the Best Chapter Web Site by the Delt National.

Relevant link: http://web.mit.edu/dtd/www

Tools used:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe ImageReady
• Macromedia Dreamweaver
• HTML/CSS
• Javascript