April 8, 2008 Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

Present: Jill Lenz, Linda Tarnoff, Sallie Varner, Merry Wright, Charlie Kerlee, Tom Harmon, Jamie Bethel.

Jill Lenz, Chair, started the meeting at 9:01 am

New Business

Jill provided updates about the following items:

University News

1. URL update: welcome.colostate.edu to www.colostate.edu
Jill already updated this link in the page footer. Use Dreamweaver’s Find and Replace feature to locate individual pages in your site that still have the old link and change the source code.

2. Reminder: Join the Rampoint "CSU Web Developers" group at http://rampoint.colostate.edu/ to receive announcements such as CSU-wide URL updates.
Log in to Rampoint and choose Groups to subscribe.

3. CSU domain name change status
Larry Cobb thanked the Webmasters for their input as documented in the January 2008 meeting minutes. No official decision yet regarding this change.

4. Editorial guidelines for department names
A style document located at this website http://ccs.colostate.edu/files/pdfs/CsUstyleguideAug07.pdf gives guidelines for the most common usage questions related to use and capitalization of departments, offices, centers (Note: Some information differs from the AP Stylebook.)

Note on capitalization: The following guidelines are intended to address and to avoid excessive capitalization, since capitalization confers added significance to common nouns. Readers may not consider such capitalized words to be as momentous as does the writer. Use good judgment in selecting a particular style – with this guide as a reference – and apply that style consistently throughout the document.

Capitalize full, official department, college, and office names. In all other instances, do not capitalize. The official format for names of Colorado State University colleges and departments is College of and Department of. Do not use ampersands, and follow this style guide’s punctuation style (ex.).

• College of Liberal Arts
• the liberal arts college
• Department of Physics
• physics department
• the Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance
• the music program

Shortened or informal names may be used on subsequent references but do not capitalize (ex.).

The Department of Economics and the Department of History, in cooperation with the Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, are hosting the event. Jim Smith, professor in the economics department, is the featured lecturer. He will speak on the history of global economics.

Avoid using acronyms for University names (see acronyms).

5. CSU A-Z listing
Don Zimmerman’s recommendations are to "Review CSU’s A-Z list. Determine if you need to revise entries, such as CVMBS departments or add links to CVMBS support offices and units. Examples, can they find pathology veterinary services? Pet owner counselor?" Jill noted that the CSU a-z listing for ERHS doesn’t read Department of following the name. Merry will check BMS, MIP and Clinical Sciences in the A-Z listing for this format and contact webmaster of the page to correct.

CVMBS News

1.  Don Zimmerman contract update

Have received all the promised documentation, a short Expert Review with a dozen recommendations, research data on the card sorting exercises, research data on the usability testing and a general web style guide. Per Dr. Blehm, Jill prepared a memo assessing the process and recommendations on how to proceed with this information to be shared with the CVMBS management team this week. Jill is scheduled to meet with Don Zimmerman to begin mapping the website according to the card sorting research data.

The purpose of that task will be to reorganize our menus and the site structure. For many of the Usability Testing tasks, the failure rate approached 75% failure rate for all groups and took all three groups more than one minute to find important information.

2.  Carol Borchert contract update

Carol is drafting college-specific editorial/content guidelines for:
Proper Names and Second References
College Calendar/Upcoming Events (new with Carol as the moderator)
College News Page (new)
College Home Page
Section/Department Home Pages

3. Outside web consultant contract update

Per Thom Hadley the top three outside web consultants have been identified by Purchasing with selections to be made by late April. This is to reprogram FAS, Medical Records, and redesign the external website possibly with a Content Management System (CMS) for the webmasters to easily update content with no or minimal HTML knowledge. It is to be determined if the consultants will build in-house or if they will use a "market" based Content Management System. That is yet to be determined and will be identified during the process.

Linda mentioned web content involving video or other interactive files, particularly for prospective students or PVM classes. Charlie explained what services he can provide to help produce short videos for the web. Jill reminded us that the InTech lab has resources and the students staffing the lab can help with some of these tasks.

4. New production server policy and Q & A session - Tom Harmon

Tom agreed to answer the following FAQ’s, which were collected by Jill since the email about the new server policy was distributed.

1. What are the web server manageability and security issues that caused the new policy of web authors no longer being able to load content directly on the production server to be put in place?
Tom should have said: It’s a check point for all web developers.   We have lots of people creating web pages and the CRG web administrators are trying to make sure the productions web servers are stable and secure.  Everything goes to a testing server first and it is each developers responsibility to make a good effort to verify that their web pages work – no more direct posting to production.  This is the current policy set forth by Larry Cobb, Kacie Reed and Tom Harmon.

2. What is the value-added of this additional step of requesting files to be loaded by someone else?
Tom should have said: Again, it’s a check point to ensure the stability and security of the production web servers.  It prevents people from posting whatever they want to the production web server before it goes through some kind of testing process.  There are over 100 different web sites on the current production web server (www.cvmbs.colostate.edu) and the CRG web administrators decided this is the best way to control what gets posted to the production web servers.

3. How do I change my workflow from working directly on the web server to adding the step of working on the development server?
Tom said: Everyone will post pages on testing and when you think it looks right, you will tell me or Kacie Reed to copy to the production server.

4. How do Tom and Kacie want to be contacted when files are ready to be moved to the production server? Phone? Email? Contact both or a certain one?
Tom said: Each webmaster will email both of us, to provide back up coverage in the event of vacation/illness/etc, when pages are updated and need reposted. You will need to give us the name of the files or folders that you changed. If changes are extensive, you can just tell us to copy the whole folder to production.

5. What is the expected turn around time?
Tom said: Within minutes to an hour.

6. How do I reconfigure my Dreamweaver site to point to the new development server when I start using this new workflow? Will I be notified when to start working this way?
Tom said: I will coordinate and work with individuals responsible for department sites to reconfigure the W drive and move those sites to the new development server. Moving the sites provides an opportunity for old file cleanup. You can work live on the development server. I think the transition will be fairly easy.
He also noted the new server has much more space, which will allow for exploration of new programming technology such as .NET. Meeting adjourned at 10:06 am.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 13^th, 9:00-10:00 am, Environmental Health Building Conference Room 120.

Minutes submitted by Merry Wright.

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