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 Web History
V0 The Beginning
The very first chapter web site was created by Bro. Marvin Ballard in the late 90's. Like many web sites back then (and unfortunately still some today) V0 was a one page design style were visitors would scroll down to get to most of the content and other links. V0 included some nice animated GIF's and not the typical background color of blue or black, but rather with a sandy brown background pattern. One of the best features was the Fraternity hymn would play on launch via Java plugin. A very simple and nicely done site that was the “Beginning” of MuEp’s web evolution.
V1 Frames
Following in the foot steps of his past president (Bro. Marvin), Bro. Steve Pina took over the duties of creating flyers and web site development in 1998. With frames still being used a lot in many web sites in those days, V1 was a framed based site with a smaller left frame for the navigation and a main frame on the right. V1 had an all white background and a large photo of about 70 Sigmas of MuEp and FAMU's Alpha Eta on the home page of the main frame. A white rounded reverse feather was done to the photo with Photoshop 5 so the photo would blend into the white background.
V2 Flashing
Macromedia's Flash 5 was making a huge impact on the web. Many corporate sites either had a flash intro or a site completely built in flash. Very few if any Greek sites had much flash, but along come V2, created in 2001 fully built in Flash 5. The index page started off with a slogan of "It is now safe to restart your Fraternity" ala Windows 98 because there was no Greek site better.
The navigation was innovative which started off spelling our motto, “Culture for Service And Service for Humanity”, and took letters from that to create boxes for each navigation link. For example the 'H' in humanity was the 'H' for the History page. With a roll of the mouse one of the navigation links would create an animation of the centered shield. The axe would spin up, the dove would pop out and flap its wings, and other quick animations. Pretty cool stuff.
Two other nice features were the 'mouse change' ability that Flash offered, which changed the mouse into the Sigma Sign. The Netscape browser looking Sigma sign is now prevalent in MuEp sites. The other nice addition was the Shield Puzzle where visitors could drag and drop pieces of the shield to recreate it.
V2 was also significant because the site switched to its own hosting & domain name and no longer used the free FSU web space which was allotted to all students. Fsusigmas.com was born.
V3 Iconz
V3, built in 2004, brought a great balance of visual design and backend technology. Unlike any of the previous versions, V3 was built with PHP and a MySQL database, thus giving it ‘dynamic-ness’ and allowing it to be easily maintained.
Most visitors unfortunately couldn’t see where all the magic is on this site, the Bros. Only area. The Bros Only login was actually placed into as early as V1, but the login was a fake and didn’t go anywhere. The area had to be done right and feature all the things to maintain the site and a few extras for MuEp Bro to have a little fun.
V3 also featured the beginning of many MuEp icons (hence the name Iconz) like Sunny the Pimp, the Iron Sigma Man which the site is built around, the Netscape browser looking Sigma sign, the Brotherhood Cup, and our young fallen Brother Homer. Many pieces of the design work were taken from flyers created in the past.
V4 Colossus
Started in 2007 and completed in 2008, V4 is the ultimate upgrade of V3. Because V3 was built with a MySQL database many of the pages just have a new look and a little better written code and improved MySql tables, but accessing the same data.
Fsusigmas.com is all about using the latest of technologies. Like v3, v4’s home page is a hybrid of Flash for the header and HTML below it with Flash footer of Sigma Icons. The “green screen” effect was created using Adobe After Effects and the music player uses MP3s and XML to dynamically play the tracks. And if you haven’t heard enough acronyms yet, well get ready for few more (to all the Geeks out there, you may enjoy this more) !
The entire site is heavily built on CSS with tables only used for the inside portions and dynamic areas. CSS allows for the background to easily change (checkout the backgrounds on the top left of the home page). You won’t find much AJAX on the main site, but the Bros. Only site makes use of AJAX quite a bit. Instead of the traditional guestbook, v4 features a community board known as Comm2 (which is was not ready at launch time, but will be ready a couple of months after). It’s a combination of a Blog that MuEp Bros can post from a range of topics, a forum that anyone can discuss and post on, a place to checkout some youtube videos, vote on polls that MuEp Bros create, or checkout some RSS links from other sites such as espn.com. The idea for Comm2 is just a place where anyone and everyone can come and get info, post info, etc.
We hope everyone enjoys their stay at fsusigmas.com V4,... come back soon, and tell others about our site!
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