Web Oversight Committee Meeting I 12/7/04 10:00 a.m. Union 302A
Present: DeAnna Starn (Chair), Ruth Ann Balla, Julie Jackson, Darby Lamb, Missy Pearce, Diane Schattner, Larkin Simpson and John Tiftickjian.
DeAnna Starn passed out a meeting agenda, an example of several worksheets and as well as an example of a scope of services proposal from Collegis. She welcomed and thanked the group for coming and agreeing to work on this project and gave an overview of our charge.
Ruth Ann Balla passed out and discussed the summary of responses from the survey that was issued by Collegis to our faculty and staff. She encouraged us to review the responses for suggestions for improvement and to look for common threads.
Ruth Ann also passed out the SunGard Collegis Web Services Overview.
Collegis will aid the WOC in redesign, assist with the timeline, etc. The timeline may be vertical or horizontal.
Noah, one of the web designers from Collegis, will be onsite in January for our next meeting. He will work with us via conference calls and onsite visits.
At our January meeting, Noah will give us an assessment of our site, navigation, flow and where we should go from the assessment.
Our job after reviewing the assessment will be to develop a strategy, a vision for our website and our priorities.
We need to determine what we are using our website for and how we want to use it – informational, recruiting, alumni, marketing, in house for faculty, staff and students.
Everyone wants to have their link on the front page above the fold (similar to a newspaper), but we cannot put everyone’s link on the front page. We need to decide what goes on the front page.
The WOC will develop focus groups to survey the “mock-up” of the new site.
Collegis has gotten questions from faculty concerning redesign. We will redesign the public website; provide templates, design help and navigation. Then we will include the links to the faculty and departmental pages with a specific design and specific information pertaining to their areas, i.e. art department, delta music institute, SGA, etc. The WOC needs to know about them and approve them.
Collegis won’t design faculty pages, but will show them how to use the tools that they provide for web design.
Our follow-up work – look at entire website presence of University. The Athletic Department site is not hosted on our site, but it needs to blend with our site. Their site is very dynamic and uses a great deal of bandwidth, so we are fine with not hosting it on our site. It might be necessary for other sites to be hosted via another server. Our group will review those currently off site and determine the appropriateness for off-server hosting.
In the Web Service Overview packet, page 10 has samples of ongoing/completed work. We were encouraged to look at these sites, as well as other sites that we feel are good site. As we review different sites, we are to keep a list of what we like and don’t like, etc. We were encouraged to send emails to the group (WOC) with the ideas we find, so that others are able to look at them and the discussion will move when we get back together.
Ruth Ann offered to create a website where all of our minutes, handouts, presentations, etc. could be posted for the entire group to view and have access to review as needed. It will be a utilitarian place hosted by Collegis.
DeAnna discussed communication and its importance. It is alright to talk about what happens in these meetings, get feedback from our areas, if we would like to bring people with us to the meetings to address a particular concern, let DeAnna know. This committee is here to accomplish a task, but also to ease fears, dispel myths and communicate to the campus our vision for the website. Be an ambassador for our goals and purposes.
Diane Schattner asked if we were essentially starting from scratch, for example are we going to continue to use Splash Pages? That is a decision for the WOC.
An explanation of how pages are labels as 1st level, 2nd level and 3rd level was given.
We will meet weekly for about 1 – 1 ½ hours each time. As we progress through the process, we will eventually not meet as often, but initially weekly meetings are needed.
Next Meeting: Tuesday, January 18th at 3 p.m. in Bailey (room to be determined by R.A. Balla). This meeting is expected to last 2 hours.