redesigning lclark.edu

Robb Shecter

Rethinking Lots of Links

Here’s a very interesting article at Slate, saying that we’ve just gone too far:

 Almost any Washingtonpost.com or Nytimes.com news story demonstrates the sites’ link-happy tendencies. A good example of the Washingtonpost.com’s overkill is this Page One story from Monday about the alleged budget crunch faced by some states. In the first 95 words, the story links Illinois, Cook County, Michigan,New Jersey, California, and San Fernando Valley to Washingtonpost.com landing pages…  Of what use are such landing pages? For the reader, little. They exist for the publisher to serve another page of ads and to optimize search engine results. 

Links That Stink: http://www.slate.com/id/2188011?nav=wp 

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Is there a CMS that supports custom/new content types?

Has anyone found a CMS that makes it easy to create a new content type? To me, this is such an important feature, but it’s been hard to find software that supports it. Drupal seems to only nominally support this — what it calls a new content type seems to be simply a web page with an admin-chosen type name.

Here’s what I mean by “new content type”, in case this isn’t clear:

A CMS usually comes pre-designed to support a few pre-chosen content types. For example, a common one is:

WEB PAGE

Attribute Name: Title
Data Type: Text string, <= 255 chars.

Attribute Name: Content
Data Type: Text string, unlimited length.

What I find extremely useful is a system that allows new content types with a new set of attributes to be created by the admin. Then, users can create instances of these types via custom-tailored dialogs. They’d then be displayed via custom-tailored style sheets. For example, a new content type might be:

COMMITTEE REPORT

Attribute Name: Committee Name
…

Attribute Name: Report Date
…

etc.

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Navigational Aids vs. Labels

There was an interesting discussion in another forum about whether to use terms such as Bursar’s Office to direct web visitors to … the Bursar’s Office. The problem is that someone, especially a non-student, who’s searching for information about payment policies might not know to click this.

And so look at this screenshot from the Army’s recruiting web site:

goarmy-screenshot

They solve this problem nicely.  As another writer had pointed out, they use common language that their audience would expect to find “careers & jobs”, which leads to detailed text that begins using the Army’s own terms -  “MOS”.

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A wild idea: using Firefox plugins

Something to think about:  Possibly doing some development as a Firefox plugin.
Over the weekend, I started a personal project writing a Firefox plugin.  It’s not very hard to write these, especially something that basically does:

  • Check if the currently loaded page matches some keyword,
  • Walk the HTML DOM, and make changes or insert CSS.

I think this has a lot of potential for cases where (1) there’s legacy code that’s notoriously hard to manage, and (2) internal users who can be advised to use the plugin for more functionality.

So for example, imagine that there are some things we’d want to fix with Trillium or the Stationery System, but are too hard or risky to do because of the source code.  The functionality could be done in a plugin.

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UC Davis CMS Survey

This is a very interesting survey:

Today, the Requirements and Evaluation committee of the UC Davis Web CMS initiative posted results from an online survey of campuses completed last month.

The survey was conducted to collect comprehensive data about the adoption and use of Web content management systems among institutions of higher education…

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