redesigning lclark.edu

Trillium

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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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.

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Trillium - CSS - Tables

This is the first of series of posts I hope to be making over the next few weeks about what does/does not work in Trillium and therefore what L&C should/should not try to carry over to the new site…

Today I want to mention a major shortcoming:  Trillium produces webpages based on tables, not cascading style sheets.  The difference in flexibility and usability is documented
ad nauseam online and so not worth repeating here.  (Trillium was of course created when table layouts were all we were doing, but things have changed for the far better.)

While we do use style sheets with Trillium to control small things like background and link colors, they could be used to control so much more.  So I lobby a point which seems a no-brainer to me, but still must be mentioned: the new site must be based on style sheets not tables!

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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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CMS — What it should be? (Or, should it be?)

In a site the scale of any major college/university, the real difficulty for new media is helping people connect the dots to different kinds of information that already exists on the site. Often, the left hand in one area of the institution doesn’t have the time to keep up with and know that there might be valuable information for them in another’s site (the right hand), and they end up duplicating the work, if it’s that important to have it available.

And, while we in new media can help connect some of those dots, and often do, it would be far faster and more robust if there were a more automated method of doing this. So, Noah and I were just talking about this and some other issues — thinking out loud about ways to see the website (and management of it) work better — and I was particularly enamored with the following idea.

What if the future CMS allowed people to tag (in exactly that Web 2.0 methodology) certain types of content (images, audio, video, text blocks, RSS feeds, etc.) or whole pages with tags, perhaps from a defined set. Further, they could set a scope of availability that might include academic-only, or select portion of the site only, or, available anywhere on lclark.edu.

Website editors could then sign up to follow certain tags with email notification or by RSS feed to be alerted when new content appears that is relevant to their site’s mission. (They would also be able to search on the tags at any time.) Other types of information would be automatically built into this system, such as alerts regarding news stream by tag and events by tag.

If the tagged element is a bit of content, as in a audio file, the site editor could then choose to absorb the material into their site (not by duplicating the original content, but merely distributing it to an additional location). In this manner, if that content changes in the future, like the tuition numbers which change annually, any page absorbing that content would automatically be using the most updated and accurate version.

While talking about this, Noah did remind me that Trillium does actually use a good base for this methodology. In Trillium, blocks of content are assembled to make pages, and within an account/site, you can re-use a block as many times as you like. What I’ve outlined above would require an extension of that methodology, so that accounts/sites could share their blocks (and a notification system to help manage that process).

Thoughts?

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