About osu.edu

Ohio State's homepage, and its 11 associated "audience and initiative" pages, were launched in September 2008. The site was designed by Ohio State's New Media Unit within University Relations. The maintenance of the pages is a shared effort between New Media and many communications partners across campus, with the joint goal of presenting the most relevant and timely information to more than 100,000 unique weekly visitors the site receives. The homepage is the flagship of a larger visual identity system, which provides common web templates and graphic elements, with a similar goal of consistency across all university sites.

Technology Notes

The pages are built around the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 4.01 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) using the methods/best practices of the Web Standards Project as well as Ohio State University's Web Accessiblity Center (WAC).

These pages are designed to be viewed by all modern standards-compliant web browsers, accessible by those with disabilities, and minimally readable by all web-reading software. 1024 x 768 pixels is the minimum recommended viewing size. Recommended browsers (free download): Firefox, Internet Explorer 7+, Opera, and Safari. RSS/XML news feeds of the osu.edu content are also available.

In addition to HTML and CSS, osu.edu pages are managed on the server-side with PHP (a widely-used general-purpose scripting language) and MySQL ("The world's most popular open source database"). The web server is a customized configuration of Linux and Apache.

Privacy

Ohio State website collects non-personal information to improve functionality and content, and to monitor the site's performance. Data is used to provide answers to specific questions about the usage and performance of the web site or individual web pages. At no time is site usage associated with individual IP addresses.

Ohio State works in a distributed information technology environment; therefore, policies and procedures for other web sites may vary. If there are questions, visitors should contact the specific department, unit or organization that maintains the site.