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Present: Jill Lenz, Merry Wright, Charlie Kerlee, Tom Harmon, Toby Mai,
Erin Napier, Larry Cobb, Jamie Bethel, Del Rae Heizer – Argus Institute, Judea Franck. Guest Meg Wilson.
Absent: Sallie Varner, Linda Tarnoff, Jay Kammerzell, Carrie Schmer.
February’s meeting minutes – approved unanimously by those present.
March 10, 2009 meeting agenda – approved unanimously by those present.
Jill Lenz, Chair, started the meeting at 9:30 am.
Don Zimmerman submitted his report about usability testing with PVM students to the Dean’s office. Jill will review it and discuss the results at a future Webmasters’ meeting.
Meg is currently working with Leslie Hilbert’s group in Communications and Creative Services to get a CVMBS home page example and an example of a second level page. The current navigation request is for research, future students, current students, department home page. CCS will create a design in Powerpoint for presentation to the Executive Council. Meg is hoping to get to Dean’s Executive Council by mid April with the branding and marketing comps and a budget from CCS for the construction of these templates.
Jill reviewed her workshops, which looked at the roles and responsibilities in web site creation and separating content and presentation. We talked about what we need to concentrate on in view of the budget cuts. Comments from the group included positive feedback about the information and learning how the design process works behind the scenes. We agreed performing any portion of the process benefits all of us. A suggestion was made about creating a shortened version of the steps we as webmasters can or would do.
With increasing frequency, someone requests a web form that allows people to fill
in information and have the information stored in a backend database. Ultimately,
the programming on the back end must be done by CRG group.
Larry suggested that CRG could design a group of form templates and the individual webmasters
would manipulate and customise the form templates within CVMBS websites for purposes of collecting
data. To facilitate a discussion about the types of information we might want to collect, Jill assembled
a list of questions for Larry related to form functions.
Some information types and functions we discussed were: demographic data, email addresses, the ability to attach documents like PDF or Word docs,
questions and short answers in pull down menus or long text fields, fields to measure outcomes over time.
He can also write the form to send an email to a person (i.e, complete pre-travel forms on line)
or populate a database with information or both; the decision would be made by the coder at
the time the page was created.
Webmasters would develop forms and databases on www2 (dev) and then request the files be moved to
production. We would then access a backend SQL Server database to mine specific information which
could be downloaded into Excel or Access and manipulated by departments for their purposes. There is a query tool for mining the SQL Server database and the query result can be stored
on a local machine.
Larry agreed to take the information resulting from the discussion and create some templates for
our review at a future meeting.
The April 14, 2009 meeting is scheduled for 9:30 – 10:30 AM in Natural Resources room 100
with guest speakers Mitzy Forbes and Robin McGee from the Warner College of Natural Resources
speaking on the basics of Content Management Systems.
The May 12, 2009 meeting is scheduled for 9:30 – 10:30 AM in Weber Room 202 with guest speaker
Jesse Hausler from CSU’s Assistive Technology Resource Center speaking on Web accessibility.
Meeting adjourned at 10:35 am.
Minutes submitted by Merry Wright.
The next meeting is Tuesday, April 14 at 9:30. Please note: location change to NR 100 (Natural Resources). Guests Mitzy Forbes and Robin McGee from the Warner College of Natural Resources, will speak on the basics of Content Management Systems
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