Brasenose College Oxford

Brasenose College Oxford will be celebrating its 500th anniversary in 2009 making it one of the oldest, as well as one of the most renowned, higher education institutions in the world.

The new website and content management system was developed by altcom using quality assured open source code. The system was built using PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS and Javascript. It has been designed to be flexible so that the college can add new modules and features easily as the system develops.

It is probably inaccurate to describe what was delivered as a CMS for it is really a web application framework from which many types of web services and interactive Web2.0 applications can be delivered. The open architecture and lack of proprietary "black box" software means that Brasenose can carry out their own ongoing development as well as calling in third party developers.

The design called for use of the Brasenose College house style.  This demanded the use of the Calligraphic font on certain levels of heading.  Normally this is impossible to achieve with the web as you are dependent on the fonts built into the browser you are using.  altcom applied Scaleable Inman Flash Replacement (SiFR) which enables the replacement of text elements on HTML/XHTML web pages with Flash equivalents.  If Flash or Javascript is not installed the assigned default browser font is used so there is no accessibility issue.