W3SC minutes
6 May 2003

In attendance: Steve Blodgett, Steve Hirby, Steve Butts, Michael Thorp, and Pete Gilbert

1. Print Media Style Sheet
   We looked with approval at Joey's implementation of a Print Stylesheet: http://lawrancj-1.student.lawrence.edu:8080/about/warch.shtml. Using IE6 (or Mozilla or Opera 6+), select Print Preview. Mr. Blodgett asked if there could be a horizontal rule under the logo at the top of the page.

2. Departmental Web Site Guidelines
   We reviewed (once again) the departmental site guidelines (http://www.lawrence.edu/committee/web-steer/webdev/deptpages.html). With the addition of an explanatory comment about FERPA, we agreed that these were still suitable and could be distributed to departments.

3. Navigation includes
   As Mr. Blodgett has been developing pages in the test directory, it has become clear that we need to modify our original plan for the left-side navigation bar. Instead of insisting on strict adherence to parent/child/sibling links, we will opt for a more flexible approach, exemplified by the pages currently in the test academic site: http://www.lawrence.edu:8080/test/academics/ and http://www.lawrence.edu:8080/test/academics/anth.shtml.

   We'll also change the label on the "top level links" pulldown menu to "Top-level links."

4. Departmental site use of template
   We discussed possible/likely confusion between the Courses of Study pages (i.e., http://www.lawrence.edu:8080/test/academics/russ.shtml) and the departmental pages (i.e., http://www.lawrence.edu:8080/test/dept/russian/index.shtml). We need to make some kind of template available to departments, but if they use the standard template "as is," viewers may get lost and be confused about the difference between a canonical page and a departmental page.

   We discussed several options, including:

   • Saying, "Oh well," and letting people be confused
   • Tweaking the template in some way (e.g., using different color backgrounds)
   • Allowing departments to include info on Courses of Study pages
   • Creating an entirely new departmental template

   After much discussion and many reversals, we decided to move forward with color variations: using stylesheets to allow different color backgrounds with the same graphics and basic layout. Mr. Blodgett will recruit his designers to select appropriate colors. Mr. Gilbert will tweak the stylesheets to implement the color changes and will see if he can get the top and left bars to be a different color.

5. Budgets
   Public Affairs and Admissions will split the bill for a summer student worker. We decided to spend the W3SC budget on Dreamweaver licenses.

7 May 2003