Today we're unveiling the new homepage for www.bentley.edu. As you explore and become familiar with the new homepage, you may notice some of our new features, described below:
The Splash Graphic (and slideshow)
Bentley has some big stories to tell. The homepage now features a suitable platform to tell them. If our previous homepage was heavy on text, this new 'splash' graphic is a visual story-telling device that gives our homepage a greater sense of focus and emphasis.
The slide show buttons (below the picture) give visitors access to a wide variety of Bentley's key messages. The slides will change over time. Please send your ideas for homepage slides and bulletins to CollagePublishing@bentley.edu.
Your Customized Homepage
A major aspect of the new homepage is the ability of visitors to customize it to their tastes by interacting with the modular content boxes:
1) Open and Close the Content Boxes
By clicking on the Open/Close arrow icon (on the left side of the title bar of each box), you can either display the content or tuck it away for another time. Here's a visual demo (no sound) that shows how it works:
2) Reorder your Favorite Content Boxes
You can change the order on the page of the content boxes. By dragging and dropping the Move icon (on the right side of the title bar of each box), you can move the box above or below another box. Here's a visual demo (no sound) that shows how it works:
3) Your Changes are Saved
Each time you visit the homepage, it remembers where you left things on that browser. It will remember all of your customizations:
The Bentley site is loading faster in your browser these days. We recently completed a round of page optimizations that included the introduction of image sprites into our pages. By using image sprites, we have reduced the number of server calls required for each Bentley web page, which makes the pages display in your browser faster.
Image sprites? Server calls? What? Let me explain. Each web page that displays in your browser contains a large handful of elements to complement the page text -- elements like pictures, graphics, scripts and text formatting instructions. When a page visitor clicks on one of our links, our web server receives that request. A server call. That page, in turn, asks our web server for the extra page elements. More server calls. For example, if a web page displays 10 images on it, 10 server calls are made to the server, bringing the total number of server calls to 11 (adding in the first call for the HTML page.)
As you might imagine, those server calls can add up, especially for visually rich and interactive web pages that contain lots of page elements. Enter the sprite. Using the above example, the sprite technique would take the 10 separate images, sew them together to create one really large image, and then send special instructions to the browser as to how to display each of them individually in the browser. It's like sending the 10 images to the browser on a single bus, instead using 10 separate cars.
Pretty clever stuff. And efficient too. In this example, we can send a one-page 10-image page to the browser using only two server calls -- one call for the page and one for the image sprite. Doing a bit more math, that means we could send five times as many pages with sprites (at two calls per page) than regular web pages (at 11 calls per page).
The result of this technique is to lighten the load of the web server, which means it can dedicate more power and speed to the remaining page requests.
Read on to learn more about image sprite techniques, theories, sprite generators, and examples.
Overall, I'd say our web site is performing a bit more, err, sprightly.
