History of the Caltech Home Page
Caltech was one of the first schools to have a web site, but without having undergone much change as late as 1997, the site needed a complete revamp. This revamp included establishing a visual theme for the Caltech web based on institute architecture, a heirarchically organized set of links on subpages, unified searching of the various Caltech databases, featured stories with images, and daily headline feeds. Curious observers also found Caltech inside-jokes hidden as Easter eggs on the site. Credits for this revamp belong to Aurelius Prochazka (project management, programming, layout, photography), Glenn C. Smith (databases, scripting, and maintenance interfaces), Danny Petrovich (graphic design), and Athina Peiu Quake (HTML, layout and architectural theme).
The latest web revamp is another striking upgrade. Having learned lessons from the 1997-2002 home page as well as the @Caltech online community and news source, Electronic Media Publications set out to achieve maximum impact within one page. Beneath a sleek artistic redesign lies a great amount of functionality. The page contains featured news stories from the Tech-Today daily news service as well as an unlimited number of headlines that rotate every few seconds. To help the user find Caltech web pages, campus links are organized into twelve navigational sections each of which can spawn submenus within the homepage allowing hundreds of links to reside on this one page. Search functionality has been greatly enhanced allowing users to search with Caltech's new crawling Google search engine in addition to the directory, calendar, archives and library databases.
