Web Steering Committee Minutes
August 15, 2002
Attending: Steve Hirby, Michael Thorp, Steve Blodgett, Joe Gregg, Peter Gilbert
Steve Hirby reported on his conversation with Andrea Maginnis at Netcasters on August 15. He spoke with Andrea because Bambi Snodgrass was not available. Bambi is to return to the office on August 19, and Andrea will convey the substance of the conversation to Bambi at that time. Bambi will call Lawrence on either Monday, August 19, or Tuesday, August 20. Points discussed were
· Lawrence believes that Netcasters has committed to supplying a detailed site map showing both the topical views and the audience views. Lack of this site map is hampering full consideration of the design prototypes because important details about the site architecture are still missing. Netcasters is asked to confirm this understanding and to indicate when the site map will be available.
· The Lawrence admissions office has expressed a strong preference that there be only a single branch of the site for admissions-related material. The presence of an audience-based entry point for prospective students and a topical entry point for admissions seems to run counter to this preference. From Netcasters’ point of view, what is the architecture of pages and paths behind each of these entry points? How would Netcasters advise us in addressing the preference of the admissions office?
· Andrea asked about reactions to the latest design prototypes. Steve indicated that we have deferred further consideration of the design prototypes until we have some navigation issues worked out. We expect to complete that work at this meeting, and should shortly be in a position to talk with them about design issues.
Pete Gilbert and Steve Blodgett reviewed the sample pages they had prepared to illustrate the navigation design consensus developed at the meetings last week. There was agreement that the design as realized corroborated the consensus that had been reached on concepts, and there were positive comments about the visual appeal of the sample pages Pete and Steve had prepared.
We agreed that our approach to navigation is as follows:
· At level 1 and lower on the site, the left-most column of each page will contain links to other pages on the site.
· As a rule, the links in the navigation column will represent the "parent" and "siblings" of the page on which the navigation column appears, with a link to the "grandparent" of the current page generally included at level three and below.
· Sometimes this rule will not lead to a navigation approach that is intuitive for the user; in such cases, a different approach may be used after approval.
· One important class of exceptions to the rule will be those in which the navigation links lead to the grandparent, parent, and "aunts or uncles" (parent’s siblings) of the current page. One example of this class is the library ready-reference page.
We discussed the amount of labor it will take to implement this strategy and speculated about the practicality of automating some of the work. We expect to use server-side includes as fully as possible, recognizing that even so the many permutations of navigation links will result in a great many include files. Joe Gregg thought it would be possible to produce many of these included files by script.
Pete pointed out that the existing style sheets render differently on IE and Netscape. No conclusion was reached as to the acceptability of this variation.
As next steps, Pete and Steve Blodgett will remove the most obvious rough edges on their mock-ups and then share them with Netcasters. Netcasters will be asked to provide critical feedback on the navigation approach. Because these pages are based on a Lawrence variant on Netcasters’ design templates, sharing the pages will also indicate to Netcasters how we would like to see their proposed templates modified.
Michael Thorp shared the results of a quick study he had done of Web sites of comparable colleges. Of 21 sites studied, 19 had only a topical link to admissions on their home page. The other two sites included both admissions and prospective students. In one of these two cases, the two links led to the same home page; in the other case, the destinations were different.
Steve Hirby noted the interest of the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) in holding a joint meeting with the Web Steering Committee for the purpose of acquainting the TAC with the current redesign project. There was no opposition to such a meeting in principle, although it was thought that we should not have this meeting until the site architecture and visual design are nearly final. Steve Hirby will pass this information on to the chair of the Web Steering Committee.
Steve Hirby, Secretary Pro tem