After many weeks of preparation, we are glad to welcome you the redesigned and rehosted Division website. It is our hope that the new website will make information easier to find. It is our goal (it's good to have a goal, right?) to keep the information updated and as timely as possible. Please let us know how you like things. Suggestions are always welcome.

For those of you who may have a website of their own or who have written some HTML, you may be interested in the technology behind this website. We are using Dot Net Nuke (DNN), an open-source web application framework. Everything about this website - its appearance, the menus, the layout and content of each page - is generated dynamically based on information stored in a database. In contrast, our old website relied on static, hand-written HTML files.

Our primary objective in adopting this new technology was to make it simpler to maintain the website. By eliminating the need to know HTML, this would enable more people to participate in keeping the website content up-to-date. A secondary objective was to improve the usability of the website. Those of us who worked on the old website are not web professionals; we kept the HTML pretty basic which somewhat constrained the usability. With DNN, we are able to implement a far more sophisticated layout. We have tried to make the website attractive and easy to navigate. Links to important forms and information are now available on every page. You are never more than 2 or 3 mouse clicks from whatever you are looking for.

The one constant between the old and new websites is how we display results from our competitions. The software which we use to run our events generates results reports as HTML files. For now, it is easier to store these files outside of Dot Net Nuke and to continue to display them using conventional HTML.