The Customer
This Faculty of Arts is currently undergoing a reorganisation. To tie in with this, Steam & Speed are developing an intranet for the faculty which will give clear information on members of staff, meetings, circulars and rules and regulations as well as providing a method of sharing information on personal projects.


The Design
The design is intended to be as unobtrusive as possible, clear to navigate but neutral and, therefore, not contentious - the faculty all have strong opinions on design and art so we were requested to make this a 'non-issue'.

We are hoping that the interface will become invisible through use, with links to sections logically laid out in a way that will encourage members of the faculty to explore and interact with the system.

It can be difficult to get users to adopt an intranet system but hopefully a community can be created here, encouraged by an invaluable and ever-changing information resource.


The Development
The site is being developed using PHP as the University runs its websites from Linux servers using Redhat. Steam & Speed have created a MySQL database specifically for the project. This will enable staff to maintain the intranet themselves, develop it in-house and keep personal information up to date.

Accessibility was also a major consideration and the site will be compliant with Level 1 & 2 of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines. The site has been tested with aural browsers such as IBM Homepage Reader, an industry standard page reader.

The system allows staff to upload documents of most types, including image files, spreadsheets, word processed documents, etc. There is an automatic archiving system to protect these uploaded files, with only the author having the option of deleting or overwriting old files.

Featuring a comprehensive site wide search system, the intranet should prove to be a valuable tool for gleaning information. There is an advanced search by Category or Context, the latter being context sensitive, ie. a search in People will bring up results about people only.

Staff members will also be able to submit images and text to the home page, to share information with the wider faculty. As the intranet is controlled by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), any additions to the site will conform to a standardized layout and format.

Even though the site will not be accessed over the internet, we have focussed on as small a download as possible, using mostly HTML for the construction, with very few images., which will ensure the system is responsive and quick to use.