tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1233316584158903995.post2594362633115699957..comments2023-05-31T11:22:44.824-04:00Comments on re.web - The William & Mary Web Redesign: The Difference Between Theory and Practicere.webhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00188047991807962096noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1233316584158903995.post-38132926142598195642008-01-24T13:05:00.000-05:002008-01-24T13:05:00.000-05:00Re: "There is a small subset of content that we ou...Re: "There is a small subset of content that we ought to treat as an "authoritative source" - that is, the one place that we look and link for specific information. These links should be treated as more "valued" than others, and should be widely referenced. If it should happen that this "authoritative source" moves, a redirect would be warranted."<BR/><BR/>I think the major point of the W3C article is that a good design would not require this subset of content to ever be moved. The other major point is that this category is actually much larger than you might expect. There is no reason to change the content of 'Spring 2001 syllabus for Philosophy 101', which may not be widely referenced, but way out in the long tail of your potential donors are alumni who spent lots of money and time with that material. If you design your web well, you won't have to shuffle old pages around with redirects and expensive redesign projects, and can mostly ignore the $0.00001 worth of storage it would cost you to keep something that could connect you to your alumni.<BR/><BR/>I'm not arguing that we should make all the old syllabi accessible, just that the transience of the web is a product of bad architecture. If you want good and useful content, design for posterity. If you tell your content providers that the work they put into some WYSIWYG CMS editor won't last more than 2-5 years, why would they get excited to contribute?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1233316584158903995.post-68454765204331052132008-01-21T11:03:00.000-05:002008-01-21T11:03:00.000-05:00In an older blog post, http://reweb.blogspot.com/2...In an older blog post, http://reweb.blogspot.com/2008/01/response-to-design-comments.html it looks like the current plan is expected to change in 4-5 years. Will the reweb plan for now help eliminate possible redirects or dead links in future designs?<BR/><BR/>It is possible: Blogger future-proofs their URLs by including a date in the string. If you expect www.wm.edu to be radically different in 2012, are you dooming what we write in the interim to be part of some inevitable "hit" in 2012?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1233316584158903995.post-29015469369976072702008-01-19T14:30:00.000-05:002008-01-19T14:30:00.000-05:00As far as relocated content, there will be an init...As far as relocated content, there will be an initial "hit" but we should also remember that there will be a better, more logical information architecture for the new site moving forward. If the location of a specific page or document changes, what may be left behind, the dreaded "404- page not found" error page should be customized and dressed within the main site template including, at least, the top level navigation. If the navigation is as intuitive as we hope it will be, visitors should be able to fairly easily find the relocated content. Between this and careful consideration of "authoritative sources" and redirects we hope to keep frustrations to a minimum.<BR/><BR/>On a related note- our new content management system will also allow us to validate internal W&M links. "Dead" links between departments and organizations will be a thing of the past!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com