Northern Lights College

Project Background

Northern Lights College (NLC) is a community college based in Dawson Creek, British Columbia. It serves about 12,000 students every year over eight campuses in northern B.C.

NLC's existing website is entirely static and has more than 3,000 pages. By nature, the site's information changes all the time. Maintaining the pages manually has become unmanageable.

The college decided to overhaul its existing website and integrate it with an efficient and user-friendly web content management system.

The system would be specially tailored to the needs of the website's content and supported by a powerful, scalable online database.

Project Objectives

• Rebuild the entire website using a selected graphic design concept.



• Integrate a web-based content management system allowing real time maintenance of the website's content.



• Provide a database-driven search engine allowing visitors to find specific courses or programs.



• Include an intuitive navigation system allowing visitors to navigate to courses and programs without the help of the database search engine.

Requirements and Challenges

• The content management system had to be simple and intuitive enough to be used by various contributors such as teachers and college staff, many of which are not computer literate.



• The system had to be highly customized to cater to the specific needs of the college. Complex rules and flows reflecting the way NLC works were built into the system.



• Data from a legacy database had to be transferred to the new online database without any loss or alteration.



• The system had to withstand high traffic, given the anticipated number of users.

Solution and Outcome

• Thin-client web solution. Web server: IIS. Scripting language: PHP. Database: MySQL.



• A rigorous approach has been followed throughout the project, using the industry-standard UML methodology.



• Usability tests have been conducted to verify the validity of the chosen solutions.



• Website was launched in September 2005.