CTE Website

The Computational Tissue Engineering program at Virginia Tech is an interdisciplinary program that allows graduate students to learn about the following fields: Tissue Engineering, Computational Science, and Molecular and Cell Biology. The vision of the CTE program is for students to feel better equipped about these disciplines and act as trained professionals that can both develop and help push the boundaries of these disciplines. The current CTE website was created a decade ago with a software system called Basecamp by our client Dr. Murali. Throughout the years, it was established that the CTE website became more difficult to update due to newer releases and versions of Basecamp and PHP. Our goal for this project was to update the current CTE website to a modern framework that would allow for an easier to update interface. Our methodology to update the current CTE website started with choosing a web development system that would best fit the needs and requirements of this CTE website. The capabilities of WordPress and additive functionalities led us to choose WordPress as our web development system. Our methodology to update Dr. Murali’s research website involved understanding the layout and overview of how the website currently looks, researching the UI of other research websites, and creating the research website on WordPress. The outlined project deliverables involved understanding the pros and cons of choosing a web development system that would leverage the capabilities of easier maintenance with a refined layout, implementing a bare bones CTE website, and implementing additional features including building Dr. Murali’s research website. Throughout the project, group members worked together to understand the front-end and back-end aspects of the project including researching specific plugins to use that would best fit the feasibility of the website, building of Figma wireframes, form creation, migration of past CTE website pages to the new CTE website, and t