redesigning lclark.edu

Make the whale happy; get involved.

Where’s the old design?

So some of you are probably wondering, what happened to the old design for this site? It didn’t seem so bad… (Or maybe some thought it did.) At any rate, it’s been put aside for now, as the website redesign is in full swing, and for the duration, it seemed appropriate to shake things up a bit.

I’ll post more on the redesign shortly, but as of this Friday, we’ll have the last of our initial getting-to-know-you-sponge-sessions with White Whale on campus to meet with all kinds of people here to get their thoughts about the current website, Trillium and what would make their day for the next website. (If you weren’t consulted, please just drop me a line — or just comment on this post and your thoughts will be there to be added to the discussion.)

So until then…

David

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Don’t Be Fooled! Don’t Reply to the Phish!

Please remember that the Information Technology department does not know your email password and will never ask for your email password. If you ever get an email asking for any kind of personal information claiming to be from a legitimate source, never reply to the email, not even to say “leave me alone.” Replying with the requested information will lead to your account being mis-used and replying with no information will confirm that your account exists, so other forms of attacks can take place.

Remember: Always confirm with the source on the phone if you ever get an email requesting personal information, passwords, addresses, etc. The phishing email will always look like it is from a legitimate source, like the IT department or your bank, so don’t be fooled!

– Information Technology Security Coordinator

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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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Tailored Web Experiences

I suppose it’s worth mentioning here one of the big questions about the Web: should a school have a single, unified website or should it create multiple “experiences” for different cohorts?The only place I can think of where we have done the latter is for newly admitted law students (”Inside Law“).For another example, take a look at the right column on the Gettysburg homepage, where they have separate logins for different cohorts who get a tailored Web experience.  Something to ponder… 

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