redesigning lclark.edu

Trillium

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.

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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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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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Interim Home Page

New Media is about to launch an interim series of home pages for the period from now until the website redesign implementation replaces them. (As such, this is clearly not intended to replace the redesign process, but merely hold us over with some enhancements.) In case you are asking yourself why this is necessary at this juncture, here are the reasons for doing this now:

  1. Better Presentation — the interim design is more open, more welcoming and has much better readability.
  2. Improved Code — this design offers improved accessibility for the disabled and uses modern web standards, with proper semantic markup (valid HTML/508). And, the design has been successfully tested in browsers representing 98%+ of our current external site traffic.
  3. Better Content Organization — the design satisfies a need to have a “On Campus” news and events focal point separate from spotlights and “standard” news or events content streams.
  4. More Dynamic — the interim home pages are composed on demand. Many of the content elements are being supplied to the home page via RSS, which we will be able to repurpose for other site elements, or even for Facebook.
  5. Timing — the redesign Implementation is at least six months off.

As we have no intention of altering Trillium’s templates (there are many) nor the wish to go deeply into content and link issues on the home page (as those will rightly be discussed in the redesign process), this interim design does not move too far from Trillium’s basic design constructs nor rearrange page content significantly.

This interim design will be carried through to each of the school’s home pages, keeping intact their current respective differences from the home page (backgrounds, content, navigation, etc.). We are only providing the institutional home page at this point, since the changes to reflect each of the three schools are relatively minor from a technical standpoint. Other differences are outlined below in the design notes.

http://lclark.edu/index.php

Barring unforeseen issues, we are planning to launch this design on Thursday morning, 20 December. If you would like to reply with your feedback on this interim design, simply make a comment on this entry. And if you’re serious on participating, fantastic! You’ll want to read the design notes.

Thanks,

David
David W. McKelvey
Director of New Media
Public Affairs and Communicationsmckelvey@lclark.edu

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Interim Home Page Design Notes

http://lclark.edu/index.php

Overall

  1. The design is table-less, and flex-width (between 760 - 960 pixels), which allows greater flexibility of design. See my blog post regarding the importance of this.
  2. The font size for all content is larger, and the leading increased to facilitate both readability and a more open feel to the design. And, if you have them, the page will display in the proper fonts Goudy Old Style and Helvetica Neue and degrade to secondary fonts if not.

Header

  1. The “Lewis & Clark” wordmark is now much stronger than before, as it should be. For school home pages, the wordmark would include the school’s name along with “Lewis & Clark,” per the standard usage.
  2. Several of the redundant links in the upper-right have been removed to accommodate the “Portland, Oregon” elements and make it more consistent with the Trillium templates. The maps link is now much bigger for easy use.
  3. While I would have liked to move the webmail link from that area, since it is slightly incongruent, it is also the most used link on the page, and I did not want to upset standard usage until the redesign.
  4. The photo at the top is much larger and more intimate, and would be randomly selected from a series. I did consider an image rotation routine, but as the home pages are often pass-thru pages, I doubt many people would see the rotation for the trouble. The focus has been pushed to include more people photos to engage the site visitor more personally. Additionally, school home pages would show only photos from that school.

Navigation

  1. The navigation is almost identical, save the application of consistent link mouseover styles.

Left Column: Spotlight Features

  1. The spotlights now take up just over half of the available area, giving the space both a better emphasis as to what’s more important, but also a more dynamic design. It is led with the title “Featured” to emphasize that it is not changed every day.
  2. There is now a “suggestion box” for spotlights woven into the “More, More, More” segment at the bottom of the section. It sends emailed suggestions to New Media.

Right Column: Today’s Information

  1. The right column now focuses your attention to the “daily” quality of it, specifically with the date appearing beneath the “On Campus” column/segment title.
  2. “On Campus” is a new content element intended to highlight prominent news and events items with a focus on the campus. It can hold up to three elements with one always shown and two available via the “see more” button. When a low-level emergency is occurring (e.g. weather closure), this section will be replaced with the appropriate notice. (Serious emergencies cause replacement of the entire page.) This content is fed to the home page via RSS.
  3. The news feed is direct from the new newsroom also via RSS. Additionally, when a podcast/mp3 file is available with the article, you can click and play it right from the home page. There is also a permanent news podcast link at the end of the “Headlines” section. Please be aware that the newsroom is in flux as we move towards it’s simultaneous launch with the home pages.
  4. The calendar has been simplified and is now RSS. (Which prepares us to begin using EMS Master Calendar late next semester.)
  5. The shield placement complies with the upcoming style guide and historic usage.

Footer

  1. The footer is expressly simple, with only a minimum of links.

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