redesigning lclark.edu

November 2007

Trillium & Web Novices

One thing great about Trillium that should be in everyone’s mind: People who are novices to webwork can actually get some fairly complex content online.   Each page is a separate html file that can be accessed via the “secret button,” which wonderfully takes them to a true WYSIWYG page for them to edit their content.  Content is split into blocks that are accessed individually right above the block itself; see the image below for a block containing a short unordered list: Trillium block Users know exactly what they are manipulating.  And they can remove [rmv], or add something new above it [ins], or change the order with other blocks [ ^ v ] , or of course edit it right there.  There is little chance of a user manipulating the wrong content. Furthermore this content can be headlines (with a choice of h-tags), text with autoformatted p-tags, text with autoformatted br-tags, objects like images or .pdfs inserted from Trillium’s Object Utility, autoformatted links, autoformatted lists, autoformatted tables, or even out-and-out HTML.  Additionally, users can repeat their blocks via the “Existing Content Block” feature. While this interface can be frustratingly simplistic  at times, it also can be quite convenient even for the most advanced users; more importantly, it enables users with little knowledge of HTML and other Web technologies to post and maintain their content.

Filed Under

One person has made the whale happy; will you?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

A Project Proposal Process

In the olden-days, proposing a new project like a department homepage reorganization, the moving of a site into Trillium, or creating a whole new site from scratch was typically initiated with a phone call or an email to someone in New Media, with a follow up face-to-face meeting.

After one such meeting, our office was talking about what type of questions always come up at the start of a project, and how it may be helpful to ask and think through those questions ahead of time, getting some thinking down before the fact to make it easier for everyone involved. Being “web people” we went ahead and created a little online form to ask these questions of people proposing projects.

The web intake questionnaire

If you have any thoughts on this please let us know in the comments below, there will be a great deal of our day to day work which doesn’t require something this involved, but when approaching a major development we think it will be a great foundation and launch pad.

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Calendar Update Coming

In the conversation I’ve previously noted with Kim Brodkin, we also discussed the Campus Calendar and some of it’s issues. Again from Kim:

The Campus Calendar has been a real problem for this symposium (and others). As others have already noted, the calendar is very difficult to read, even when you know to look for a particular event. The problem I face with postings for the symposia is that these are complicated events that warrant considerably more than a simple line that says “Multicultural Symposium.” Should we list each and every panel, performance, reading, lecture, and workshop separately? There simply isn’t the space for that on the calendar.

Not having been here long, I know only the basics about calendaring at L&C, but have learned enough that it is fraught with challenges (not unlike other colleges, but we can do better). In order to reserve space you fill out one form, to get it on the public calendar another, and there may even be more. (I really don’t know, more than one form is already too many — I stopped there.)

However, while the school registrars are also shifting to a new method of allocating space, event management is also changing software. In a jointly managed project between Michael Ford, Sherron Stonecypher, Matthew West and New Media (Noah, Robb and I), we will be migrating events management to EMS Master Calendar.

We are just in the beginning stages of this migration with most of the work coming during Spring semester, but when complete, there will be a new calendaring system with a single, easy-to-use form for both requesting available space and resources, as well as putting your event on one of the several institutional calendars. And, EMS Master Calendar comes with the latest features including RSS, so we’ll be able to publish many different feeds of events by theme (arts, athleics, symposia, etc.) or other tag/segment.

Follow our blog feed for more information as it becomes available.

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Google Mini

I had recently been in an email conversation with Kim Brodkin regarding the difficulty she was having with the L&C search (specifically related to the Multicultural Symposium). I’ve reprinted part of our conversation here with her permission. First, from Kim:

Until last week, if a visitor to the LC website typed “multicultural symposium” into the “search” box on the home page, the recommended websites did not include the page for the Multicultural Symposium, but the list did include the symposia for International Affairs and Environmental Studies. A quick call to Noah resulted in an immediate correction of this significant problem, and we were grateful to him for fixing this instantly. Because the URL for the symposium is so long and unwieldy, it is vital for people to be able to visit the website and get to the symposium with as few clicks as possible. Because there was no mention of the event anywhere else on the main page, the “search” box serves as important way to locate our site.

This is not a new issue, as part of our search is “hand-done” and we are working on a solution to automate it more easily. But, it occurred to me that frankly, a lot of people probably don’t know this. So, in addition to the “short links” about which I’ve just posted, Lewis & Clark has purchased and installed a Google Mini.

Essentially, a Google Mini is a computer that lives in the server room and spends it’s time both crawling and categorizing your site, and delivering up results to people like you and me doing searches of the site. The difference between it and Google itself is that we (in this case IT, New Media and the libraries) get to help refine it’s search results. The Google Mini is in testing now, so that when we release it, it’s producing results at or better than currently provided, but I have no specific release date yet. (I’m sure I’ll post something here when it comes online if you’re keen on it.)

With the help of the Google Mini and short links, we should be able to better help promote significant events.

Filed Under

Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Short Links Now Available

To those of you that have struggled with the promotion of an event, some news, or other material that offered additional information or registration available at some long or otherwise cryptic link, we now have a short link solution for you. They come in the form of:

www.lclark.edu/go/keyword
(where “keyword” is a specific action word related to your promotion)

To give you an example, we made the following one for New Media, which if used, will return you to New Media’s home page.

http://lclark.edu/go/media > http://media.lclark.edu/

If you’re interested in this new service, please keep the following criteria and conditions in mind (no specific order):

  1. Generally-speaking, a short link is related to a specific promotion which is time-based — an expiration date of no more than a year is required.
  2. There is an expectation that some of the traffic will be coming from presentation in a non-clickable vehicle (e.g. print, audio or video).
  3. The destination for the short link is long, or non-sensical.
  4. The keyword is a short action word(s), closely related to the theme of the promotion, and not likely to be used by another segment of the institution (e.g. “admission” is not specific enough).
  5. Although we will try not to reuse keywords (hence some of #4 above), at the same time we cannot guarantee the same keyword from year-to-year for annual promotions.

Also, if you require click-thru data, please let us know when we setup the link. (If you are sending everyone to a promotion-specific page, then you don’t need it, but if they’re landing on your sub-site home page, you would. We can help you with this decision.)

All of these are created by hand on a case-by-case basis, so please give us at least a week’s notice so that we can work out all the details and agree on the keyword. Simply contact Noah or I to set them up.

Filed Under

2 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)