Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

January 9 , 2007

Meeting conducted by email.

Initial Email from Merry Wright, Chair

Webmasters,

Most of us are involved in other things this week in preparation for the spring semester beginning, so we will not meet in person tomorrow, but I will ask for a few opinions and comments about web page validation and 2007 goals.

Email Response from Jill Lenz

Hello all,

Here are 10 possible ideas for future agenda items:

  1. Review of using the W3C online Validator to check for source code errors. Congrats to the College Home Page and MIP Home page for passing validation. I reviewed other department home pages and major pages with the W3C validator and found the following:

    • College Home Page (error free)
    • BMS (17 errors)
    • ERHS (26 errors)
    • ClinSci (1 error)
    • MIP (error free)
    • VTH (1 error)
    • College Administration-Dean’s Office (3 errors)
  2. Review of the W3C online validator’s extended interface to show outlines would be a good review of semantics. Although the College Home Page and MIP Home page pass for validation, the use of headers (semantics) could be improved. Tom and I discussed this for the College Home page and I’m working on coding the text in the top banner to an H1, which is involving some changes to the CSS.
  3. Review of images in web pages. Some topics of concern are missing alt text, missing HxW values, images falsely resized in source code, download times, etc. I found quite a few examples of these concerns, especially in faculty pages. Fixing these images will make the pages load faster.
  4. What’s new in Photoshop CS3. The latest version of Photoshop is available in beta, we would want to do this after the official release is available, probably later this spring.
  5. Review our web pages on a smart phone or PDA, something with a small screen. See how easy or hard navigating our pages is on a small screen. Tom Harmon has a web enabled smart phone and he said many in our college are starting to use these.
  6. Old Business: links to e-Insight and Insight magazine - I think we only addressed part of this issue, redesigning the Insight index page to make a distinction between e-Insight and regular Insight, but we never discussed the elimination of links to both on the college homepage as mentioned in Jamie's original email. We just have a link to the index page.
  7. Faculty images – maybe the departments want to share their procedures, for example I think Erin said MIP made it part of the new hire process, some are taken with department digital cameras, tips for the person behind the camera shooting portraits…
  8. Search function upgraded to include web pages under the csuvets alias
  9. New server web capabilities, including Server Side Includes for navigation menus, headers and other items that repeat from page to page

  10. Tackle the left hand navigation on the College Home page – reduce/refine – make it more user friendly – less cluttered – more concise. Here are some examples of university sites with user-centered navigation on their home page that I like.

Email Response from Merry Wright

Thank you, Jill, for clearly listing some of the ideas we discussed recently. I also attended several PDI sessions about mobile computing and remote access and made a note to put this on an agenda, which Jill has mentioned in item 5.

Relevant to the list, Jill has offered to conduct a brief refresher training covering items 1 and 2 at the next webmaster meeting in February. It seems like a good idea to polish our skills before we take on some of the other tasks, so I will make that the first agenda item for February. If time allows, we can address our old business in item 6.

Please let me know any suggestions for the ordering of these items or additional thoughts this list may spark. Thanks for your input.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 13th, 9:00-10:00 am, W1 A/Z.

Minutes submitted by Jill Lenz.

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