January 8, 2008 Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

Present: Tom Harmon, Jill Lenz, and Erin Napier.

Jill Lenz, Chair, started the meeting at 9:06 am

New Business

  1. Email from Larry Cobb regarding possible change to colostate.edu name

    All,

    There is an important analysis going on right now. At the highest reaches of the University administration the idea has arisen that, for marketing and branding purposes, the CSU Internet domain name should be changed from COLOSTATE.EDU to COLORADOSTATE.EDU.

    Various committees are looking into the costs and benefits of making this change, including the costs of not making the change. Note that this change would affect websites and hyperlinks, mail lists and listservs, applications, mail addressbooks, email clients, most published and printed materials, and computer and server names.

    By mid January, I am going to be asked for some estimates of the costs in time and money to adjust to this possible change. Would each of you that this might affect please give some consideration to this and help me with an accounting of what it could affect, and if you can, what it could cost to adapt to a change.

    I appreciate your input. Thanks.

    Larry

    ____________________

    Lawrence Cobb
    Director of Information Technology, Dean's Office
    College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences

    Members discussed the change. For those familiar with Dreamweaver's Find and Replace function, the change should be easy enough to make to the 40,855 html pages on Neptune, our main college web server. This particular server has about 90 subdirectories at the root level. These changes on Neptune could be made by the Webmaster committee members.

    The majority of time would be on administrative tasks such as creating a listserv of web authors beyond the Webmaster Committee to facilitate communication by email so other Neptune web authors could be contacted about the change, verify they are the right contact, train them how to manage the change and follow-up that the change was made correctly. We estimate this change would take about 500 hours.

    Please note that there are many other html pages associated with our college on other servers such as csuvets, lamar and bernardino and many interactive pages created by our College's programmers that are not included in this estimate.

    We also discussed related items, such as printing costs for business cards and printed literature from the Development Office and other entities, the length of the name, and current and potential confusion. Overall, this is a serious big change if it goes through and will typically involve more time than we originally estimate.

  2. Agenda item ideas for this coming year:
    • Presentation by part-time student workers Brad and Ash on their services for the college, even if we have to schedule outside our normal meeting time to cater to Brad and Ash's availability during the school semester.
    • Review image tags for missing alt and HxW attributes or images falsely resized in source code, downtimes, etc.
    • Review our web pages on a smart phone or PDA, something with a small screen.
    • Focus on how webmasters can do their jobs better, for example we reviewed "deprecated" tags in the past.
    • Review documentation on CSU Web Guidelines
    • Keep on top of new technologies and trends for web design

The meeting concluded at 10:00 am.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 12th, 9:00-10:00 am, Environmental Health Building Conference Room 120.

Minutes submitted by Jill Lenz.

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