Ohio University recently made a $215,000 overhaul to its Web site to improve the speed, search capability and maintenance of its 184,477 Web pages.
The Office of Information Technology added five new servers to the infrastructure and a Google search engine to the main page.
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said Sean O'Malley, OIT communications manager. We wanted to have our search reflect those changes.
The Google hardware was installed over the summer along with four servers dedicated to increasing Web site performance and one dedicated to authoring OU pages. The improvements were made over last summer in anticipation of the significant increase in Web traffic that comes with students' return to Athens, O'Malley said.
Generally, heavy site traffic at the beginning of the quarter bogs down the servers and slows browsing.
This year the system is handling peak loads in stride IT Web services director Jay Beam said in a news release.
Unfortunately, these major improvements won't be noticeable for most students, O'Malley said.
Essentially
the site will simply be working properly
and no one complains when everything is working as it should
he said.
Even scheduled outages for maintenance will be less likely with the new hardware. The old server had two processors within a single machine, which had to be shut off when technicians updated the system. The four new separate servers each have eight processors. Technicians can shut off and update one server while the others share the load. -
but the new version is much improved
said Web specialist Michael Tedesco, who manages more than 700 Web pages for the OU Graduate College.
Still, IT warned webmasters on its Web page that there could be small bugs while updating the software, such as issues converting flash files and incompatibility with certain Web browsers. IT is offering training for webmasters, but many won't need it, O'Malley said.
For people who are already maintaining pages the change wasn't so radical that they can't maintain
he said.
The changes not only address immediate problems, but also serve OU's long-term OIT interests, O'Malley said.
This series of improvements ensure that OU has a Web environment that not only has everything it needs to operate effectively now
but also into the future
O'Malley said. We are building for the future.
