I really liked it. I stayed after and asked Janie about the possibility of using mini equalizers within the sub-sites. She was hoping that we would use them. She also told me that they would be willing and interested in working with the LIS Website Team to help us organize our site as well as making suggestions for the actual design. Glad I stayed to ask a question!
I liked it too!
Ditto! Thanks for asking those questions, Liz!
Way to go, Liz!
I loved the new design – really excited about the possibilities.
Had no idea you were so famous, Ian.
:-)
I also was pleasantly surprised! I thought it would be like MIIS – but that’s really a 2nd level. This will stand out from the pack when prospective students are looking at many colleges. It would be wonderful to work with WW on the LIS design – how can we set that up & get it on the timeline? So glad we have the Oracle on our team!!
Liz, Janie brought up your request at the design/IA meeting we had at the end of the day as a sort of “wrap up” session. While the inner page design concepts are still completely up in the air at this point, there was hope around the table that the “eqaulizer” could be useful in someway on interior sections of the site. To loosely paraphrase Jason, “We’re committed to [the equalizer] as a design concept, we’re just not sure how we’ll use them yet [on the rest of the site].” And, of course, Middlebury needs to approve and commit to the design before we worry about this.
There was, however, reluctance to overuse that design element throughout the site. For one thing, it would make the homepage less special. For another, if you start having that design do a whole bunch of different things, people are going to have special needs that dilute the impact of the design. For example, Athletics might request to use it for rosters, but needs the jersey number of each player to show up in the bar, oh and the bars should be panthers instead of bars, and they all need to be the same color! That’s a silly example, of course, but you can see why we might not want to commit to something like “all news should be presented this way”.
So, here’s what I think we need to do if we think those design elements are useful for LIS: define exactly how we’d use them and what advantages they’d offer our group. What content from LIS would be appropriate to present in this manner? Would this presentation require changes to the design? How could this benefit other sub-sites?
Barbara, I am preparing an email to Tonya about the proposed Athletics information architecture and will mention in that email that we might like some review of the LIS IA. However, I think we need to define those broad categories of the LIS site and what platform they’ll live on before involving Tonya in IA review so she isn’t spending time reviewing content in a CMS that is going to move to a Wiki (wikis have *very* different ways of handling IA). Looking at our timeline, it seems to make the most sense to give her our proposed IA for review on/after 8/19.
As far as design work with WW, we need to be mindful that there’s still MIIS work to be done (which is a current priority as their site launches on 9/1) and Middlebury really needs to approve the design framework we saw today before too much additional work will happen on interior designs. We should keep our eyes and ears open moving into the fall to see how these opportunities will present themselves.
I loved the new web design!
A quick reminder (repeated from the Wiki meeting notes) to comment on the web redo blog about the new design! (Maybe someone could carry over the applicable comments here to that space as others have done for comments on the redesign from other Middblogs?)
At the very least, go over there and read the comments. I was surprised by the number of negative ones, and some are rather entertaining… The debate over whether or not it was a good idea to drop “College” amazes me! Do people really think it would take the average teenage Internet user more than a few seconds on the page to figure out it’s the homepage of a college? And do they really think that said user wouldn’t figure out how to navigate the site in under say… a minute’s time? I personally think our future students deserve more credit!