Please Heed College Web Guy

College Web Guy is right - "university org charts aren't road maps for web architecture."

'nough said.

posted by Susan Evans

Reading Papers, Grading Exams, and Reviewing Web Copy

Last week, I put out a call to a few on the W&M faculty. Not so perfectly timed with their simultaneous responsibility for reading papers and grading exams, I asked some professors to review and comment on the web copy we're preparing for launch.

We are lucky at W&M - our faculty gladly agree to participate in campus-wide projects like re.web. Already, I have a commitment from Chuck Bailey, Jen Mellor, Dan Cristol, Kate Slevin, Pam Hunt, Margaret Saha, Heather Macdonald, Laurie Koloski and Eric Jensen. Thanks all!

Larry Evans also spent a Sunday morning reading through a few sections of copy - course he's living and breathing re.web right along with me. Probably didn't think he had much of a choice . . .

posted by Susan Evans

copyWrite - W&M Impact

This week's copyWrite post is a first peek at a sample entry for a special interest feature (a SPIFF) that will be called W&M Impact. Written by Joe McClain, Alma mater of the national bird will be one of several stories and profiles showcasing the many ways W&M makes Williamsburg, Virginia, and the world a better place to live.

W&M Impact
Alma mater of the national bird

Seeing a bald eagle is a thrill that never wears thin and some of the best places on the East Coast to see our national bird are within a few minutes drive of William and Mary's campus.

You can occasionally see bald eagles from campus, but a surer bet is to go out to the Colonial Parkway between Jamestown and Yorktown. Eagles nest on Jamestown Island and they’re a common sight from the meadows and beaches along the James River.

It's poetic justice to have bald eagles so accessible to us, since two of our researchers have deserved a lot of the credit for the comeback story of the bald eagle. Mitchell Byrd and Bryan Watts of William & Mary's Center for Conservation Biology have documented the return of the bald eagle in the Chesapeake Bay region from near-zero numbers to the point where there were enough of them for the species to be removed from the federal endangered species list in summer of 2007.

Each year, the Center for Conservation Biology conducts census flights during nesting season over the shoreline of the Chesapeake and its major tributaries. Quite often, it's Byrd and/or Watts climbing into the cockpit of a Cessna 172 operated by a former fighter pilot known as Captain Fuzzzo—spelled with three z's. “The middle z,” he says, “is silent.”

The Endangered Species Act allowed for eagle nesting areas to be protected from development. The Center for Conservation Biology’s flights pinpointed the areas—even the individual trees—which needed to be protected. For their contribution to the eagle's comeback, Byrd and Watts received National Recovery Champion awards from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in March, 2008.

The story of the eagle is not over. Removal of the birds from the endangered species list will open up lots of prime real estate that once only eagles could call home.

"About 95 percent of the eagle nests are within three kilometers of the main river channel. Eagles feed on fish and other aquatic prey, so they live in close proximity to the main shoreline,” Watts said. “Delisting presents a potential conflict because the shoreline property is the most valuable property for development."

posted by Susan Evans

We're not testing you, we're testing the website.

Six high school juniors made their way to the former rubber factory that is home to mStoner in Chicago. Henry Broaddus and I watched intently as Patrick DiMichele or Sarah Weidaw asked each student to perform a series of tasks on a mockup of the new W&M site.

I wish the room had been big enough for all of you to be flies on the wall. It was fascinating, rewarding, and even a little nerve-wracking to observe the prospective college students surfing our site. Fortunately, a detailed report of the usability testing will be prepared by mStoner. Until then, here are a few of my anecdotal observations:

• Almost without exception, students clicked on Admission to find the cost of tuition; and on Campus Life to find out about student clubs.


• Almost all of the students commented about the beautiful photos of the W&M campus.


• Many of the student testers suggested that we make the list of "majors and minors" easier to find.


• Lots of students mentioned that they'd like to see more about athletics on the site.


• A good number of the students indicated that they would enjoy reading student blogs.

By the way, we're not done yet . . . we're in the midst of testing 10 more juniors as I publish this post.

posted by Susan Evans

Usability Testing Part 2 of 2: The Product

Last week I blogged Tribe Voices: new software being developed by the IT Web Team.

Tribe Voices isn't part of re.web, but it is related. As you know, the College is purchasing a web Content Management System (CMS) to run websites for William & Mary's academic and administrative departments. The newly-designed W&M site will offer faculty/staff directory pages, but complete personal web pages will not be a part of the CMS. Tribe Voices, designed for faculty, staff and students, will create personal websites-- thus bridging the gap.

We wanted Tribe Voices to be easy to use, so we conducted usability testing on a model version of the software in early 2008. Our testing helped us design a logical user interface, and it gave us some ideas on the features people wanted.

When Tribe Voices is released on April 30, 2008 it will contain many of the things people requested. Among other features, it will:

- Include a "wizard" that helps first-time users create a website quickly

- Have a main menu that makes it easy to find everything you need

- Be completely web-based. You can create, edit and publish web pages without ever leaving your web browser. (No mapped drives!)

- Automatically build a website navigation menu (that you can edit if you wish)

- Have a simple blogging tool that allows comments and RSS

- Allow you to place Flickr badges, maps, movies and Facebook info on your site

Read more about Tribe Voices.

posted by Joel Pattison

Letter to a W&M Web Editor...

Dear W&M Web Editor,

Thank you for writing. I know you have a lot of questions about re.web, and what it means for your website.

We've created a timeline for moving departmental websites into the CMS and design suite. It will begin in June: mStoner and the re.web project team will transition top-level websites as we prepare for the launch of the College's new home page on July 31. After the July launch, departmental websites will gradually migrate to the new web content management system.

With guidance from the Web Advisory Committee, the W&M Web Team will manage site transition and provide central support for departments. Rather than simply moving existing sites into the CMS, our goal is to redevelop sites using a comprehensive approach. This means working on information architecture and examining content, copy, photography and multimedia.

A copy of the transition plan is now available (pdf).

Thank you for your interest and support of this project.

Sincerely,
Joel Pattison
re.web project team

Beauty AND Functionality

This face was bred for Beauty. I cannot smell a thing.
(Tiger, the Persian cat in the film Over the Hedge)

We are fortunate to be working with talented designers at mStoner, and equally skilled programmers at Global Image. Design is about beauty. Programming is about functionality. A talented designer considers usability and interaction during the design process. And a skilled programmer considers how best to preserve the look and feel of a design as he or she is programming.

But design and programming are very different disciplines. The programmer literally slices apart every element the designer created. Each component must individually be made functional.

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.
(Frank Lloyd Wright)

And this is where skilled project managers meet with the obsessive client representatives to hash out the idiosyncrasies of implementation. The culmination of this process is a document called the Functional Specification (or Functional Spec, for those conserving syllables).

Yesterday, the re.web Implementation Team had our first conference call with our project managers—Patrick diMichele and Michael Burks—regarding the Functional Spec. An exciting two hours later, and we have a first draft covering 5 of the 12 layouts to be built within the Cascade CMS as part of our implementation contract.

Getting back to the difference between designers and programmers, here's a real-life issue we are addressing:

William and Mary decided on Concept One for our new homepage. One of the elements of this design is the Rockwell font in the tactical navigation bar (starting with Information For), the primary navigation bar (starting with About) and other text on the page, such as Education Unplugged, Events, William and Mary News and Read More News/RSS.

This raises implementation questions. Since Rockwell is not a font available on all computers or browsers, should these elements all be created as graphics? Or should some of them be created as styled text with some magic web toolkit to make them display correctly. A few web programmers addressed this specific issue in 2004, creating just such a magic web toolkit dubbed sIFR.

One two-hour conference call down, and I can't yet give you the definitive answer on implementation of the Rockwell font. We will probably use creative combinations of graphics and sIFR on different layouts for different purposes.

We just thought some of you might like to know what's going on behind the glass, as we sit around the speaker-phone in our conference room, eyes glazing over spellbound.

posted by Andrew Bauserman