WEBMASTERS COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES

February 12, 2002

 

Members present: Jamie Bethel, John Chandler, Martin Fettman, Tom Harmon, Sallie Hilligoss, Jill Lenz, Erin Napier, Mary Pridgen, Sallie Varner

 

I.   Old Business

 

  1. Accessible Forms – Joe Strecker will make last year’s PVM application available for Sarah Gales to review with JAWS the screen reader.  Results will be shared at future meeting.
  2. Work Session Update – held 2 work sessions for 6 people.  Went through toplevel page conversion steps at http://www.cvmbs.colostate.edu/webmaster/templates/toplevelconvert.html.  Any more needed?  Idea of revised top navigational image came up—Jill would be willing to meet with anyone who would like to revise this.  Dr. Chandler suggests using the new logo in top right corner, CSU logo on top left corner, with header links and then larger typeface for Department name.  Serif fonts seem to be preferred over sans-serif for large type.  Dr. Fettman would prefer to see all second-level pages designed consistently.
  3. “Interdisciplinary Programs” has been added under “Academic Programs”.  List was reviewed, anyone who has additional programs they want listed should contact Linda Tarnoff.
  4. Changed “Dean’s Office” to “Administration” and include “Dean’s Office” under flyout instead.  Both “Administration” and “Dean’s Office” point to the same page at http://www.cvmbs.colostate.edu/cvmbs/dean.html . . . No strong feelings regarding separating them out to two individual pages, seems OK to have more than one way to arrive at a page.
  5. Add link to “Faculty Resources” under “Administration”.  Currently “Faculty Resources” points straight to “FAS”.  A separate page to “Faculty Resources” will be built in the future.  Who is working on this?
  6. Discussed time dedicated to Webmaster Tasks: how much time spent on Web work, how much we could spend, a wish list of things we’d like to see on our site but don’t have time and/or ability to make real.  Gave our written estimates and verbal feedback to Marty Fettman for him to present at planning meetings regarding the College Reorganization so our needs can be anticipated and budgeted for, and we again discussed the possibility of having a “web-specialist” in the college assigned the responsibility for webpage design, with input from our committee members made available to them.  The wish list items mentioned included a Faculty Template, so that consistent Faculty pages could be created for any Faculty member in the College, routine submissions to both internal and external search engines so that our pages are easily found, a search function for faculty's webpages, a way to dynamically change the text-only College home page to match the JavaScript-enhanced College home page whenever changes are made, more photos for the web pages of College-specific events such as "Free Pet Dental Exams", etc. and also up-to-date photos of faculty and staff to replace any out-of-date photos.

 

II.  New Business

 

  1. The new CSU Home Page was viewed at http://www.colostate.edu.  We like the fact that the “Flash” items are gone, but some members had noticed big gaps of white space in the CSU Logo area at the top of the page on large screens.
  2. Comments on College Home Page
    1. Concern regarding the wording of "Cancer Cure" link from PVM student was discussed.  We determined other wording could be used—agreed

     “Cancer Center” would be less misleading.

    1. Link to WebMail requested by a staff person—we decided this would be somewhat redundant and not needed on our pages.

 

(Items C and D tabled until next meeting.)

 

  1. Web Access Committee Update
    1. Future plans – raise awareness of Guidelines and Checklist posted at http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/ATRC/Resources.htm.  Please review the two-page checklist - this is new.  Hope to have these included as Weber Help Desk http://www.colostate.edu/Services/acns/bulls.html.  Contacting Council of Deans, Web Developers Group, etc. to make presentations.
    2. Latest issue of Comment at http://comment.colostate.edu/ mentions CVMBS website.  See the article titled “Assistive resources adapt technology to community needs” on page 1.  It continues on the last page and this is where our site is mentioned by Sarah Gales, a screen reader user.  Here’s a quote from an email from Marla Roll, Director of the ATRC about the article:
      “Hello all - just wanted to remind you to check out Comment for a nice article on Sarah Gales.  I do have to admit though, that I was getting ready to send her an email reminding her to check it out on the web when I realized that it is in PDF format.  In other words, Sarah has no means for accessing the article on-line.  Kind of ironic....”
    3. Disability Awareness Days, week of March 25th.  I’ll be helping with a session in the LSC Student Center Sunken Lounge from 10:00 a.m - 2:00 p.m. on March 26th, 2002, which will be offered lab style with several computers set-up running assistive technology programs that can be used to view web pages.  ATRC staff and others will be available to demonstrate how web pages are read by various technologies.  We will have copies of the full version of the CSU Web Access Guidelines available as well as the new CSU Web Accessibility Checklist and the CSU Quicktips for Web Access.  Questions on Dreamweaver usage and HTML will be welcomed.
    4. Bobby at http://www.cast.org/bobby/ changed to “Bobby Worldwide” (not a free download anymore, complies with 508 Standards, has new icons)
  2. Official CVMBS logo – high resolution and multiple sizes of .gifs to be added to Webmaster page.

 

The meeting was adjourned at 10:00 a.m.  The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, March 12, 2001 at 9:00 a.m. in W-1 Anatomy.  

Mary Pridgen  3/5/02