May 15 meeting minutes

The committee met at 11-12 today. I am really pleased that the site begins to take shape, at least structurally. A number of things to report:

1. Gary will email everyone about the blog (which you are reading), the mock-up site, etc., so that people can swing to work on these sites. The idea is that each office (e.g., DGS) will revise the section on the internal mock-up site.
   
   What to do on the mock-up site:
   
   • Revise/edit existing page(s): Once logged on, you can select a page and edit like in Word. You can paste in information, too. When you are done, click on "publish". It automatically saves all the changes.
   • Create new pages. On an existing page, select some words (which will be the name of the link), click the "link" button on the righthand tools area, and follow from there. It creates a link to a new page. Then, follow the "Back to .." link to the left of the "Publish" button, scroll down to find the page you just created -- it's blank, of course. You can start edit now.
   • Comment: there is not a comment tool, but you can simply type your comment, select the text, and change it to a bright color.
     
     
2. WRT WeST's graphical mock ups, the committee generally likes the 2-column design (sample 2), but with specific requests and suggestions. The front page should have:
   
   • Contact info clearly presented
   • Mission Statement, but short
   • A rotating profile of faculty, labs, research groups (and graduate students?)
     
   • Search box, a must
     
   
   In addition,
   
   • the current design lacks "depth" and is flat. Which is to be expected for a quick mock up, but hopefully the final version will be much more visually appealing.
   • the announcement should be visually distinct from the mission statement and other elements.
   • there was discussion about where to put Job Announcements. The should be featured in both "Events & Announcements" and the "For ..." section on the front page.
     
3. The committee spent most of the time on how to represent Graduate Studies and Research Areas. The message from both DGS's is clear -- applicants need to indicate which program (tracks, or whatever the name will be) they are applying to. Their applications will be reviewed by faculty in that program.
   
   One of the highest priorities in the Graduate section of the website is to reduce the confusion of applicants -- and the number of inquires to our staff members. This entails that, as a design principle, we should always bring prospective applicants back to "Graduate Studies" page. In other words, there is only a single entry for graduate application, where the DGS has control of information flow.
   
   I changed the mock up site so that wherever we have "How to Apply" links, they bring the applicant to the "Graduate Studies" page, rather pages of than individual "programs".
   
   
4. Research Areas: there were questions about the differences between Graduate Programs and Research Groups, but time didn't permit further discussion. Looks like we don't need much change here, except the "How to Apply" links.
   
   
5. About the Department: a few things need work here
   
   • Mission statement is too long
   • Quick Facts -- vital stats on # of faculty, grads, majors, and many more possibilities.
   • Brief History -- who writes this?
   
   
6. Time line: You should have seen the timeline on the righthand side of this blog. The committee thinks it's reasonable. We will see if this will work with WeST.
   
   
7. Where to go from here:
   
   • Gary will meet with Blyth on Friday to communicate the structure of the site and the feedback on their mock-ups.
   • Requests to faculty: Photos, and Bios
   • Feedback: via email and blog. Sometime in June/July WeST will present several designs for feedback.
     

A couple of older docs

For keeping track of developmental documents, we use the Google Doc site for sharing Word and Excel documents. Documents can be secure/private, shared, or public, which may be quite useful.

• Template for Research Groups, which I eventually copied to this mock up site.
• Membership roster, a spreadsheet to keep track of who is in which group, for the future.

Further more, the Google Picasa Web is an online photo album where we can host photos of lab images, dept events, etc. For now it's (the album associated with this account) is set as public but it can certainly be "unlisted". Here's a picture served from the above site:

Feedback

To let us know your thoughts about the design, the process, or just about anything else, do one of the two things:

1. talk (email, call) Gary, Ian, and/or members of the committee. There is a reason the old fashioned way works for thousands of years.
2. Or, leave your thoughts -- anonymously if you prefer -- at this site. It's easy. There is a "post a comment" link at the bottom of every blog entry. Click and start typing away. The comments are moderated; they will appear as soon as someone reviews it. Someone will.
   

Photos, photos

Everybody needs a face-lift. We are working with Duke Phtography to get new portrays for our faculty. Duke Photo has an internal web-based album to for all the pictures they've taken for this project. So far we have faces of 19 faculty there.

• If you have already had the picture taken, log on here to view your pictures. Follow the instructions in the email you received from Tommy at Duke Photo
• If you haven't had a chance to get the mug shot, please contact Tommy at 684-4391 and schedule a meeting.

Thank you all!

Welcome to the mock up world

The Web Committee will be meeting today for the 5th time, if I am counting right. The goal is ambitious -- to try to settle down on a structural recommendation to the web developer, the WeST Group at Arts and Sciences, soon to be part of the OIT.

Here are a couple of things that will be the basis for today's discussion.

For a working "wireframe" model (i.e., the structure, not the presentation), see

http://dukepn.googlepages.com/home

For WeST group's first mock-ups, see here