History of the OPSA Website

OPSA was possibilty one of the first students' associations in NZ to have a website due to the popularity of IT and Design at OP. However, nothing appears to have been archived (was possibily on the local intranet only).

The site evolved and was put on the www sometime in the late '90s. It had a total overhaul in around 2000 that was contracted out to a nice guy called Nathan someone-or-other. While this site looked great at the time, it did not date well. For a wee laugh have a look here.

Then I appeared on the scene and screwed with Nathan's frames as a way of learning html. However, since the site was designed students' needs of our website had changed (and it looked decidily uncool).

As a replacement in 2005 I stole Liverpool University Students' Assn's site as a good layout of what I wanted, and prototyped a model for our new site. The layout was similar to LUSA's, but with our own graphics. This model of course became the actual site. Check it out here.

However, being a model rather than a properly designed site mean while it meet its needs at the front end, it was a bit of a nightmare behind the scenes. Enter, Richard Mitchel, who recoded the site into PHP in 2007, making global alterations and updates far easier (and apparently much better than the frames I wanted to use). Richard also coded the Gyro site with its own CMS. We also finally got our own domain at the same time.

Mark Baxter
2007