December 18, 2007 Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

Present: Jill Lenz, Erin Napier, Linda Tarnoff, Sallie Varner, and Merry Wright.

Merry Wright, Chair, started the meeting at 9:00 am

New Business

  1. Merry Reviewed this Year's Accomplishments

    • Members reviewed and fixed many pages with HTML Validation errors
    • Members reviewed the webinar "Writing Right for the Web" which brought up good discussion and was helpful in other written communications
    • Merck-Merial Summer Research Program Web site was redesigned. Originally, it was only one page which Terry Nett thought was too busy. Terry and Linda worked with Jill to review what other campus Merck program sites looked like and ideas to restructure the information. Linda and Terry worked together to update the structure and Linda reported that Merck was very happy with the new look and CVMBS received it's requested funding.
    • Graduate studies in Health Physics information was reorganized keeping the "Writing Right for the Web" guidelines in mind, Merry and Tom Johnson better explained the program and added a paragraph to answer the frequently asked question "What is the difference between Health Physics and Medical Physics?" By adding short headers, bulleted lists, keyword/carewords, industry words and meaningful content, they are now ranking higher on the search engines and are seeing an upward trend in number of hits. Merry did a few Google searches to demonstrate. Merry said Tom was very cooperative in this effort as he feels the Web site is a recruitment tool.
    • We didn't get to review image tags for missing alt and HxW attributes or images falsely resized in source code, downtimes, etc. We also didn't get to review our web pages on a smart phone or PDA, something with a small screen. Maybe when the future Content Management System is in place portability (small screen) issues will be solved.

      Discussion: Members present felt most faculty and staff that consider the Web site a recruitment or marketing tool are typically very cooperative in providing content. This is very helpful since we are not the content experts. There are frustrating complaints from other faculty and staff who propose content or ask where content is that already exists, for example seminar lists. They just don't know the pages are there.

  2. Jill Gave Updates on Outside Expert Web Help

    1. Don Zimmerman Usability Project Update

      Jill described how the card sorting sessions and Web usability tests were conducted and what she observed. These data collecting sessions are now done and the research team is compiling the report we expect to receive sometime in January. Jill anticipates there will be recommendations on a simplified navigation structure, possibly a recommendation of pulling some content into an intranet area for internal users.

      Discussion: On the topic of "intranet" we took a look at the RamPoint Portal accessible only by CSU eID. Merry signed in and we reviewed the "Academics" and "Research" tabs and wondered if our people are using it? We don't even have a link to it on our Web pages. The "Academics" tab provides links to courses schedules, the General Catalog, advising and more. The "Research" tab provides useful information such as tracking submitted proposals, awards received, upcoming deadlines, and many other resources. The "Library" tab provides a link to login to your library account and reserve books. Merry mentioned she searches and requests books through this system and uses the option to have the items saved at the front desk for pick up or sent though campus mail.

    2. Carol Borchert's Contract to Write Content

      A new contract with Carol Borchert, long-time editor of Insight and E-Insight magazine, has been established for her to write content for the College home page and the four department level pages. Carol will provide fresh content on a regular basis, give it a consistent voice, and select "best" materials to showcase the College. Jill and Carol will begin with the College home page in January then work on the department home pages. Jill will work individually with the current owners as the transition in ownership takes place to ensure valid HTML, logical semantic structure, and compliance with the latest CSU Web Standards and Guidelines, as announced at the September meeting by Thom Hadley.
  3. University-wide Link Change

    CSU Communications and Creative Services issued a memo on November 1, 2007 as follows (originally posted at the WebDev home page):

    TO:      All campus web developers, web designers, web content managers, and subnet managers
    FROM: Communications and Creative Services
    RE:      URLs of Main page required links are changing

    With assistance and direction from the University Administration, in the next two weeks Communications and Creative Services will be launching a new version of the Colorado State University Homepage. This redesign is in support of the ongoing branding initiatives of the university while preserving much of the familiar structure of what works today.

    In the past, the basic link structure and filenames (using the familiar "index.asp?file=et_cetera" system) were preserved between each design generation. This time, however, that is not possible as we have moved to .NET and the master pages model.

    WHAT THIS MEANS TO YOU: Since the "Web Site Requirements & Guidelines" (http://webdev.colostate.edu/index.asp?url=guidelines) specify several required links for all CSU web pages, you likely have many links in your web pages that will need to change. Here is a guide to what is changing:

    Equal Opportunity Statement

    • old: http://welcome.colostate.edu/index.asp?url=info_csu-equalop
    • new: http://welcome.colostate.edu/info-equalop.aspx

    Disclaimer

    • old: http://welcome.colostate.edu/index.asp?url=info_csu-disclaimer
    • new: http://welcome.colostate.edu/info-disclaimer.aspx

    Privacy Policy

    • old: http://welcome.colostate.edu/index.asp?url=info_csu-privacy_pol
    • new: http://welcome.colostate.edu/info-privacy.aspx

    Student Disclaimer

    • old: http://welcome.colostate.edu/index.asp?url=info_studentpage-disclaimer
    • new: http://welcome.colostate.edu/info-studisclaimer.aspx
    Other Items of Note

    Central Search Resource**

    • old: http://search.colostate.edu/index.asp
    • new: http://search.colostate.edu **

    The CSU Homepage**

    • old: http://welcome.colostate.edu/index.asp
    • new: http://welcome.colostate.edu **

    **If you link to "index.asp" on these items, omit the filename entirely and just go with the domain. If you link directly into a search resource, contact me for more information.

    TIMELINE: These links have already been enabled on the current homepage, so we encourage you to make the change now to avoid any unforeseen problems when the site is launched. Nonetheless, once the new design is live, we will have a redirection system with monitoring in place to handle requests to the old URLs.

    Jill said you typically won't find the links with a search in Dreamweaver if your pages were created using the current templates, only when you hover your mouse over the links at the bottom of the page and view the status bar in the lower left corner when the page is live in a browser. This is because those links, specifically the Equal Opportunity Statement, Disclaimer, and Privacy Policy are in our footer.js file. Jill will change the footer.js file after the meeting and notify everyone by email when the change is made. The committee already used the updated "Central Search Resource" which we simply call "Search" with the new templates so that is not an issue. And the CSU Home page link is permanently redirected (see March 2003 minutes, Old Business, Item #2) to www.colostate.edu so that is also not an issue.

    Please note that this will only update links for pages that use the current templates or refer to the footer.js file located in the root of our Web server. There may be some pages where these links are hard-coded in or the page refers to a different footer.js file which will need to be changed. Try a Dreamweaver source code search. If you come up with nothing, you may be aware of some lower level pages that aren't using the current templates where these changes will need to be made.

  4. Nomination/Vote for 2008 Committee Chair

    We were running overtime and several members had to leave. Merry addressed this agenda item by email: "We are unanimous in accepting Jill's offer to chair the committee for 2008. I offered to 'swap' tasks with her and take minutes for our meetings in 2008. Thank you, Jill, for expressing your interest. Thanks to all of you for your participation and ideas in 2007!"

The meeting concluded at 10:08 am.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, January 8th, 9:00-10:00 am, Environmental Health Building Conference Room 120.

Minutes submitted by Jill Lenz.

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