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Web Policies
Bill Penn: Rethinking Trillium, the Calendar, Email-lists and Design
- 13 May 2008
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.
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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
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William C. Penn, Public Interest Law Coordinator
Filed Under
How do I get my event in the “On Campus” section of the home page(s)?
- 31 January 2008
Before getting into the details, please note that this policy is simply a portion of a bigger picture regarding the storytelling we do about Lewis & Clark — that we express the themes of academic leadership, global and local engagement, and our being in and of Portland.
Getting on the List
Now that the On Campus section of the home page is starting to take root, it seems only fitting to explain the process of selection/ranking of material is performed. First of all, the content to be included must meet the following criteria:
- The event must be of public interest, must be open to the public, and must represent a distinction for Lewis & Clark that connects with one of our key messaging themes.
- There must be a web page or site to which we can link so that interested site users have a convenient way to click through for more information. For an event, a simple campus calendar entry alone is not sufficient. We are looking for a more robust page, including a basic prose description of the event and participants and, ideally, photos of the speakers or performers. With enough advance notice, the New Media team can assist you with creating this content.
- The event must “beat out the competition,” so to speak. We receive many requests for “On Campus” items; because of limited space and the large number of compelling events, we will not be able to accommodate every request and will have to weigh the external audience’s interest and the event’s relevance to institutional goals.
Decisions about “On Campus” content are usually a group effort involving myself, Public Relations Director Jodi Heintz, and PubCom AVP Tom Krattenmaker. If you would like your event considered for the “On Campus” section make sure you’ve submitted it to the calendar and provided a link to a web page with additional information.
Even if your event does not eventually appear in the On Campus section of the home page, getting the above information organized and into the web calendar at the earliest possible opportunity will greatly help PubCom help you get your event publicity. It may be that the best publicity to meet your goals would be best accomplished through other means, and the shorter the time interval between our hearing from you and the date of the event, the less we can do with you to help meet your goals.
Note: All events that are open to the public and have been posted to the web calendar are automatically included in the weekly events news release distributed to local media.
The Ranking Methodology
As to ranking items once they are added to the rotation, the following rules will be applied via an algorithm. These rules primarily apply when the schedule is full (i.e. more items than the available three spots). When this is not the case, future items may appear on the list earlier than noted below, ranked in order of proximity to start date.
- Notice-level “emergency” news, such as closures for weather, trumps everything and will always take precedence. The notices are always of limited time periods, and so will not impact the overall list unless ongoing notices are posted as part of keeping people informed. (Serious emergency news is handled differently.)
- Major institutional events (i.e. Commencement) will get higher billing than all other events because of their cross-school, intimate involvement with all facets of the institution and the public.
- On average, all items will appear no-earlier than one week before the start date of the item and would generally stay in the list until the start date. (The closer to the start date, the higher in the list the item appears.)
- For items that have extended multi-day periods, such as art exhibitions and the like, the item would also re-climb the list as the closing date draws nigh.
- If an item also has a spotlight covering the issue, event or news, the On Campus item may be reduced in rank to promote other items without such.
While we are currently performing all the above manually, we will be automating the process soon. Once that occurs, you will also be able to click a “see all” (or similar) link to see and search through all the past and present On Campus items. Further, you will be able to segment the list by various categories or tags, so that you might only see law-related events, arts events, etc.
Filed Under
Why don’t I get a web address like www.lclark.edu/something?
- 4 December 2007
Addresses that come off the root, as in lclark.edu/something means that the page, or site, or redirect exists at the very base of the web server’s file architecture (a root address). Now, at first, we could assign a bunch of things to the root and have no issues with that, but at time wears on, we’d begin to run out of assignable names (as they were already assigned in the past).
Further, we’d start to see conflict between similarly-named segments of the institution, say CAS admissions and graduate or law admissions, which could result in confusion for the average site visitor, who cannot be expected to know that there might be three different admissions offices. After all, they’re likely only searching for one.
What complicates this is that while the web seems to be ever-dynamic, web addresses cannot always be so, as we rarely know how many people may have bookmarked/favorited a particular page or how much later they may want to use that bookmark/favorite. So, when we assign a location, we want to make sure it’s going to be nearly permanent. (We do move sites later and redirect people to the new location, but that still means the original location is “occupied” by the redirect.)
So, expect that New Media will be very careful in helping you figure out a location for that next site, or that promotional url, and that despite the desire to have the address as short as possible, you will likely not get a root address. In those cases where we do refuse to give you a root address, we do hope you appreciate that we are protecting Lewis & Clark’s future opportunities; and, if the issue is promotional, we are certain to help you out with a /go/ address.