WEBMASTERS COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES

November 14 , 2006

Present: Jamie Bethel, Charlie Kerlee, Jill Lenz, Erin Napier, Linda Tarnoff, Sallie Varner and Merry Wright.

Erin Napier began the meeting at 9:00 a.m.

New Business

  1. Main menu Javascript - some users have difficulty using the submenu flyouts. Anyone have any ideas on how to make the flyouts more user friendly?

    The main issue is user mouse control when moving from the horizontal sub menu across the top of the department pages to one of the flyouts below. See below for a screen shot of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology's (MIP's) Research page showing the cursor hovering over the sub menu item "Research" and the three flyouts are "Key Focus Groups", "Conferences", and "Seminars".

    MIP's Research page

    Remedies include:
    1. Providing an underlying page that matches the linked sub menu item, for example, MIP's linked item "Research" leads to a "Research" page , so users can follow this link instead of the flyouts.
    2. Providing links in the underlying page that match the sub menu flyouts, for example, MIP's linked flyouts under "Research" include "Key Focus Groups", "Conferences", and "Seminars". Links to these items should be repeated in the page content. Currently, only one of the three is listed.
    3. Educate users that they can follow the sub menu items to get to a page that includes the same information, i.e. the page contains the links to sub menu flyouts. Remedies A and B must be in place first.
    4. Revising the sub menu flyout code from JavaScript to Cascading Syle Sheets. This will also accommodate two groups of users, those who use Assistive Tech programs and turn off JavaScript, and users of handheld devises (handheld devises don't currently support JavaScript).
    5. Removing the flyouts altogether.

    After discussion, the committee agreed to Remedies A and B above.

  2. Proposed change to header link entitled “Students” to “Students/Prospective Students” - Linda Tarnoff.

    Discussion followed about short vs. long link names, everyone having to change the text in the top banner of all their pages, alternatives to the name (Future Students, Current Students, Student Programs, Student Resources), and the current Students page content.

    It was agreed to keep the name the same, and update the Students page to include info from Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences (ERHS) and Clinical Sciences, who don't have active links yet, add student organizations such as /pvmpathclub/, /vettext/, /vetbehaviorclub/, and /scasv/ and separate the Professional Veterinary Medical (PVM) information from the rest. Linda will update the page and encouraged everyone to please send her links to their respective department student information.

  3. Chris Weller email from October - “There have been several updates and modifications, including modifications to colors, logos, and fonts. I encourage you all to review the new “communications toolbox” (http://ccs.colostate.edu/files/pdfs/CCS_GS-06-for%20print.pdf) publication if you haven’t had a chance yet.”

    Do we want to consider using more “green” and “gold” colors in the new design? Erin could create some “examples” for future meetings if this is something that would be of interest to the committee.

    The official CSU green changed from #006633 to #13694e and an official gold color has been defined as #aa800e. After discussion, it was agreed Erin would take baby steps and try changing the color values in the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) on a sample department level page for links, headers and the green bar. If the color changes clash with the current College logo or department name images featuring the old colors, we may wait for the next redesign to incorporate the new colors.
  4. Chris Weller email from October 19 - "Internet Explorer 7 is out now: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ If you haven't been testing out your Web sites with any of the beta copies - then now is the time."

    Linda Tarnoff said she has IE7 installed and from what she has seen so far of the College Web pages, everything looks good. Jill had the same experience, so she contacted Cath Kilcommons from the ACCESS Project and ATRC to ask if Cath had seen any pages break in IE7. Cath shared the CSU Occupational Therapy page as one example.

    Below is a screen shot of the page appearing correctly in Firefox 1.5.8.

    Occupational Therapy page screen shot in Firefox 2.0

    In the IE7 screen shot shown below, the div ID for content has floated up and behind the images at the the top of the page, the department logo, the student photo, and the CSU logo. A little bit more appears between the top horizontal navigation and the heading level one "A Program of Excellence!". Much of the content is visually obscured behind these elements and shown outlined in red.

    This page was designed by Craig Spooner back in the summer of 2003 and was one of the first Web sites on campus to incorporate XHTML and Cascading Style Sheet Positioning (CSS-P). If you view the source code and read the comments, Craig took considerable care to test the site in many versions of browsers and platforms. However, over the past three years, things have changed, for example new versions of many browsers have been introduced with different support models, resulting in the jumbled look below. With a few updates to the CSS, Craig will have this fixed.

    Occupational Therapy page screen shot in IE7
  5. Jamie mentioned with the new version of WebCT and the integration of Banner, the name will change to RamCT. Jamie mentioned it will be quite different from the current version and Computer Training and Support Services (CTSS) training will be available before the new version rollout.
  6. Jill mentioned she presented three sessions last week at Web accessibility conference in Boulder. One was a hands-on session reviewing the content, presentation and source code of the Equine Hospital Web site designed by an outside Web designer with over 400 lines of code and 29 tables. In the session we created a new Cascading Style Sheet and Web page with only one table, half as many lines of code and a smaller file size. Another session was a lecture on User Centered Design featuring the story of our College Undergraduate Web committee's goal to reorganize hand-to-find information with their users in mind, and the book "Don't Make Me Think" (2nd edition) by Steve Krug. More details in Jill's conference report.

Old Business

  1. e-Insight and Insight changes discussed at Sept 12 meeting - status report?

    Jill reported she talked with Carol Borchert, editor, about the suggested changes. Carol prefers a chronological listing vs. two separate columns for Insight and e-Insight. Jill will mock-up a sample for Carol's review and somehow visually make the PDF versions stand out in the chronological list so they are more distinct.

    Carol Borchert would like the links to the current html and pdf versions added back to the College home page in place of the paragraph of text next to the Insight logo, which is a link to the Insight home page. Jamie Bethel had mentioned the same thing at the September meeting, that these two links were dropped during the change to the new redesign look, content was changed as well. When Jill last met with Carol, she encouraged Carol to send an email to Tom Harmon to make this request to add the two links back.

    Linda Tarnoff reported that Thom Hadley checked the number of hits on the Insight links on the College home page, and it was significant enough to keep them.
  2. Department Newsletter links in the “In The News” Section - are these monthly/quarterly/yearly newsletters?

Note: Erin and Tom have been the committee co-chairs for 1 year - agenda item for December will be appointing/reappointing/voting for new committee chair(s).

The meeting concluded at 10:05 am.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, December 12thth, 9:00-10:00 am, W1 A/Z.

Minutes submitted by Jill Lenz.

Return to Webmaster Committee Minutes page