September 9, 2008 Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

Present: Jill Lenz, Merry Wright, Charlie Kerlee, Tom Harmon, Toby Mai, Erin Napier, Linda Tarnoff, Judea Frank, Larry Cobb

Jill Lenz, Chair, started the meeting at 9:05 am

Old Business

1. Jill - brief updates on outside contractors Don Zimmerman, Carol Borchert and Square I.

A. Don Zimmerman is submitting a proposal to the Dean's Office to study other user groups, such as pet owners and veterinarians, and offer a plan for iterative design. Don invites committee members to watch some UT in his lab if this proposal goes through to see how everybody thinks different when approaching a website task.

B. Carol Borchert is also submitting a proposal to the Dean's Office for more web writing and composing the web strategy and standards documents.

C. Square I – Jill and Larry met Kent last week. Next: intro meeting for him to meet Carol and Don. Small projects in the works 1) Small Animal Surgery 2) the College’s new Financial and Strategic Services Department

New Business

1. Jill - review the concept of paper prototypes in the web design process.

At the last meeting some members expressed interest in participating in the new redesign process. In an effort to allow the Webmaster committee to offer suggestions and have a voice, Jill distributed a document with guidelines for creating a paper prototype for web pages. The reps from the 4 departments will be tasked to create a paper prototype for CVMBS faculty pages to be used across all departments. The paper prototype and decisions behind the choices will be shared at the next meeting. For a brief introduction to this topic, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_prototyping
But please let Jill know if something like this task is asking too much of your time or if you want to receive education at a more basic or advanced level.

Discussion of guideline differences between public facing pages and research lab pages, with a focus again on the level of depth in the website at which a template design is not applicable. There is no answer yet to this question. It’s too early for any recommendation to decision makers at the Dean’s level.

Meeting adjourned at 10:12 am.

Minutes submitted by Merry Wright.

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