The Web Design Museum
College Connection Homepage Design
College Connection Homepage Design

Exhibit, launched August 2011

College Connection

A new website for a college scholarship search service.

Technology stack used

HTMLCSSJavaScriptjQueryPHPCodeIgniterMySQL

Project goals

The original collegescholarships.com was created in 1995 and needed to be rebuilt into a web application that allowed for storing and search college scholarships.

Solution

The project was built in 2 phases. The first phase was taking the cumbersome static file system and turning it into a dynamic online system.

The 2nd Phase involved building a public interface that allowed students to create profiles on the site that would automatically display matching scholarships based on their interests and needs.

In the first 48 hours the site had dramatically increased it's traffic and had picked up hundreds of new profiles without any marketing whatsoever.

See it live in 2011 (opens in a new tab)

The web in 2011

What was the web like back then?

  • Top browser

    IE8

    46% of users were using Internet Explorer

  • Screen size

    1280×1024

    on a 17- or 19-inch flat screen

  • High-speed internet

    40%

    of US adults didn't have high-speed internet at home

Building for the web in 2011

  • New this year

    IE9 finally did rounded corners, web fonts and video.

  • The end of Flash

    Adobe gave up on Flash for phones, four years after the iPhone shipped without it. Desktop Flash hung on until 2020.