Present: Michael Thorp, Robert Lowe, Nancy Truesdell, Peter Gilbert, John Enters, Steve Hirby
The purpose of the meeting was to consider the possibility and desirability of a redesign of the Lawrence University WWW site. The course of the meeting generally followed the order of questions distributed by Steve Hirby in advance of the meeting.
Principles on which the present site is based were reviewed. It was noted that the notions of timeliness and currency of information were guiding principles in the site design, even though there were omitted from the referenced document. Discussion focused on the following points:
We discussed whether to reorganize the site completely around specific audiences, rather than, as now, combining a topic focus and an audience focus. There was interest in this approach, though it was also noted that audience-oriented sites are hard to do well.
There was extended discussion of the character and quality of the content relating to academic departments. Academic departments need their own pages with a distinctive look and style not dictated by the standard template. The existing template-based department pages provide useful information but do not evince the character of the departments.
We need more student personal pages.
We need more pages for student organizations.
We need to offer more in the way of services via the Web. The present site is largely brochure-ware, which is passé . Could we do the parking lottery on line? Could we provide a better email lookup facility? Could we have events calendar pages based on dynamic content?
Distinct pages having related information are not always linked to each other explicitly. E.g., the pages in the academic info section describing courses are not linked to the pages in the registrar's area indicating when the course is offered.
The button navigation scheme lacks specificity. Newer rollover techniques expand a button into a block of text or provide a menu behing the button from which the user can make a selection. Adopting these techniques would improve our navigation.
Navigation in the site would be improved, especially sub-site navigation. The navigation buttons at the top and bottom of each page help in gross navigation, but for help in moving within a subsection of the site that is well developed (sports, news and information, for students), the buttons are useless. We need a clear method of local navigation as well as of global navigation.
We also discussed the need to design the site with the capabilities of standard tools in mind. The possibiltiy of a redesign of the site graphics was discussed but not resolved. The idea of a student Web-page competition was suggested as a way to foster student interest in developing Web pages.
On the one hand, it was agreed that reworking the site from time to time is absolutely essential, and that the present site, being about two years old, is in need of such reworking. On the other hand, it was noted that such a project would be a major effort, and Lawrence is already engaged in a major system rework (the Banner project). Does it have the resources to do both at the same time?
The sense of the committee was that a redesign is necessary, though daunting to contemplate. Even so, we began talking in terms of rolling out a new site design in the fall of 2001, and there seemed a willingness to spend the next six months of so working out in detail what such a new design would entail.
The next meeting was set for Thursday, June 1, at 1:00 p.m. Before then, however, the chair rescheduled the meeting to Monday, June 5, at 2:30 p.m.
Respectfully Submitted
Steve Hirby