redesigning lclark.edu

Information Design

Carla Almaraz: How about a portal?

Here’s another recent comment regarding the redesign from Carla Almaraz which I’ve excerpted:

“Here’s my $0.04 (allows for inflation). My biggest grumble is that the entire school website is directed at an external audience. I’ve been told that the reason for this is that ‘people search for things.’ Trying to find a department is next to impossible, especially if you don’t know the formal name of the department. If we just had a single portal to navigate to all the internal departments, that would be so helpful.”

Carla, thanks for recognizing that the external orientation of the website is not likely to change — after all, we need to make the site the most friendly to those who have the least knowledge of us, our organization and our taxology. While a good website architecture can help solve the simple problem of identifying and navigating to offices and departments (and I expect to have that post redesign), your suggestion of creating a space where you would be able to find all the things in which you are interested is also on the table.

And now, I’ll make an important distinction that your email touches indirectly. You’ll note I didn’t use the word Portal with a big “P,” or even portal with a small “p,” because like content management system (CMS), they can mean so many different things.

At this point, we are not considering firing up a huge piece of Portal software that intends to be everything to everyone. We are very seriously considering creating a personal space (or spaces) where you would be able to find links, news, and other information directed at specific “internal” or “community” audiences and where you might be able to customize the page to your needs. How this will be designed and deployed is yet to be seen, but we see the need and think it will help everyone navigate through the site far more easily.

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Bill Penn: Rethinking Trillium, the Calendar, Email-lists and Design

Bill Penn recently took the time to email about some of his frustrations and suggestions for the redesign. His comments relate to both technical and design issues, and I thought them instructive, well-organized and well worth including here. Thanks to Bill for allowing me to post his email — it follows with my comments inserted where appropriate.

—

David,

Please find some comments here on the web site redesign.

I maintain a moderate corner of the law school’s web site, the Public Interest related pages. These pages are spread out between different areas, some is in its own corner, the LRAP, and most of the rest is located in career services, with a tangential relationship to the student group PILP. There is also probably something out there in the admissions department or development department about public interest scholarships that I need to track down.

Because of this distributed nature, I have had to create my own snazzy navigation bar and menu. You can see this in the one area that I have gone through and re-designed, the LRAP page : http://www.lclark.edu/org/lrap/

This was a pain in the tuckus to put together as the only css available to mortals is inline. This means for the flashy hover color changes I had to resort to javascript, and I had to put together and hand edit about four pages of html, most of it repeating.

Comment 1: The ability to maintain at least document level css would be a godsend in a new cms even if the css that users are allowed to create is forced to be subservient to a site wide css. Additionally, my need to create two levels of sub menus shows a need to allow content creators to have some way of creating and maintaining themselves sub-navigation levels.

Response: While I haven’t yet figured out how the CSS will or will not be available to edit/modify, I’d expect that any modifications would happen in conjunction with New Media, as we’d want to preserve the over-arching styles as much as possible, while working with the office/department in question to give them input/ownership over the design. In any case, inline styles would not be necessary (nor allowed) and your navigational solution, while inventive, wouldn’t be necessary, since the design would include it directly.

-

I saw a comment about different contexts for different users. The law school career services has five contexts in its site, students, graduates, graduates and students from other schools, prospective students, and employers. The result is that most of the contexts other than students is under-maintained, and largely blank. Much of the information that is valuable for one context is valuable for another, so that brings me to:

Comment 2: Contexts can seem like a great thing, but if a high percentage of information overlaps contexts, it is better to have a page or three that branches off to serve that community than to maintain five separate areas.

Response: Indeed this is true — part of White Whale’s work is help us re-organize the content into a structure that makes sense given the audiences and the available information for them. Where information is specific to the audience (and exists), segmentation can make sense. Where it doesn’t, we’ll do something different that does.

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Event overlap is horrific at the law school, something is needed to integrate the personal, event and web calendars into one. Something is needed better than the current ems calendar, and something better than meeting maker is needed preferably with the ability to view multiple calendars in one window, and the ability to turn on and off individual calendars and a snazzy ability to plug a calendar into a web site. (Think google calendars, or Apple’s calendar server and ical Outlook finally supports ics and ics subscriptions, so an Apple calendar server could do nice things.)

Comment 3: Calendar management and display of calendars on the web site should be considered.

Response: Separate from the redesign, we have purchased EMS master calendar (which interfaces with the VEMS calendar used to schedule space) and we hope to deploy that as the “authority” of scheduling, where we might push content in and pull it out for display/use in the website. EMS Master Calendar includes a web interface, but we may opt to do something different, depending on the web redesign. And as you suggest, this may also include a mash-up of web services, or at least the ability to push to them and their formats. By default, EMS Master Calendar publishes RSS feeds.

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Much of the site parts that I manage and I imagine most of the law school’s web site involves chunks of largely static information, and small bits of news updates.

Comment 4: An ideal cms would allow for the integration of blog like (hot news) sections of pages with more static elements, the blog like parts could rotate out to a news archive so people could look back at past postings. Perhaps users could have a central bucket of blog/news postings that they merely apply a tag to for them to appear in the proper place or places on the web site. A blog section of a page could be told to pull the latest entries from one or more tags… I could see myself using all public interest tags for the public interest home in a condensed headline only format and then in the individual areas just using the tags for that area in a full or summary view.

It would also be nice for end users and allow for a transition away from the 1,000,000 daily mailing list e-mails if these blog/hot news sections could also be served out as rss feeds. News updates offerings and events should be a pull technology like a feed, alerts and warnings should be a push like e-mail. The design and ability of the web site stretches beyond its bounds to other areas of our work.

Response: My thought exactly, and one I’m hoping to employ in the redesign. News would be a shared resource and able to populate any page on the website, depending on the selection criteria for that page. And, since the Source has been well received, we’re thinking about how we can extend the same form of service to other groups on campus in the redesign.

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Comment 5: NO TABLES, please, tables were a bad idea when Trillium was made, heck I remember people deriding the use of tables for formatting back in 1996, but still there are unneeded tables in the Trillium page design!

Response: Exactly my plan. Tables will only be used semantically — that is, for tabular data only. View the source of this blog. :)

I am supremely pleased that there are people out there charged with thinking about the web page re-design. That is all I can think of, and sorry for the ranting.

Respectfully yours,

Bill Penn
–
William C. Penn, Public Interest Law 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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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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Starting Monday March 17th, the Redesign

Some History

In mid-January, I sent out a request for proposal (RFP) to about ten different firms, large and small, local and distant, that had come up on our radar as potential companies that would be able and well-suited to help us form the strategy for our website redesign. Two weeks later, after a process of meeting and talking with several companies, six proposals were submitted.

Our small committee of Dan Terrio, Tom Krattenmaker and myself reviewed the proposals and selected two firms to invite to campus for informal two-hour “interviews.” (At this point, it should be noted that both firms were excellent and would clearly be able to handle the job. What we really needed to discover was what the working relationship would be like.)

Both accepted and we met with each of their teams during mid-February. Those sessions gave us lots to think about, and after consulting with members of New Media, PubCom and a few others across campus, it was still very close. (And what really threw helped us solidify our decision was the responses from the references provided.)

With that, I’m pleased to announce that White Whale (WW), a small educationally-focused web design firm from Oakland, Calif. will become our partner in forming the forthcoming web redesign strategy.

What’s Next

A week or so ago, we officially signed the contract and I’m happy to report that beginning tomorrow, March 17th, Jason, Tonya, Donald, and Alex — all of White Whale — will be on campus to meet with select groups over three days to hear from all of you what should become of our web site.

And as of this posting we’re opening up authorship of this blog so that WW can participate in and communicate about the web redesign as we’re all working through the process. (One of the reasons that WW rose to the top was due to their very collaborative process with their client-partners.)

So, if you have some thoughts about the web redesign, be sure to:

  • communicate them with any of us, WW, IT or New Media;
  • stop us if you see us in the Trailroom or elsewhere around campus; and,
  • watch this blog to continue the conversation.

There’s a lot more to come over the next few days in particular; I’ll be posting more soon.

David

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