Web team – vision statement.
Barbara
The Web team will design, test and implement a new LIS Web presence.
The LIS web is used both to provide information about LIS and as a means to deliver services and provide access to resources.
The product will be tied in with the new College web design.
Our first priority will be usability. Other important considerations are ease of maintenance, and continued development.
I really like that you mentioned that the site is a delivery mechanism for services, where many of the other visions posted (mine especially) focused on just access to information.
I notice that you added in that the LIS site will be “tied in with the new College web design”, in (potential) contrast to Carrie’s statement that we’ll be determining the design. I see this as a possible decision we’ll need to make prior to forming the vision.
I think design can have two meanings (if not more!), and here as Barbara uses it, I took it to mean “organize and arrange” as opposed to what White Whale is doing with designing the overall look and feel of the college website. Is that what you meant, Barbara? And is that possibly also what Carrie meant?
I agree with Jess. I’ve heard the word design in our conversations and I’ve taken it to mean “organize and arrange”. My expectation was that the LIS website would use the same template as the main site and that we’d be focusing on IA (information architecture), how the information is presented and content organization.
I know that the people who manage certain areas of the LIS website, particularly the library information have long desired a custom design for that portion of the site that allowed them to be more flexible in the display of information.
My hope is that the design(s) delivered by White Whale as part of the web redo will acknowledge and fulfill this need, but we have had planning discussions (prior to the formation of the formal Team) where we have discussed the need for some portions of the LIS site to have their own design and we should probably be prepared for that possibility.
Ian, I think I see your point. Are you saying we should anticipate the need for customization of the LIS website within various LIS workgroups and departments, and be prepared to offer workflow guidance if they want to, say, make their portion of the site work differently than, say, the ones we create for the public portions of the site? I guess I was thinking only of our role in organizing the public-oriented portions of the site, but I can see how some departments may want their content online but may not expect it to be used by everyone. Is that what you meant?
At this point I don’t think we know what constraints will be decided upon from “above” i.e. college wide. How much will the whole Midd site have a unifying feel? From what I’ve heard there will be more freedom as you get further away from the top (home page) levels. Both cosmetic look and content architecture are in my mind part of design. I think it will be important to get info about the college design as soon as possible – how can we seriously do “design” for LIS otherwise? Personally I favor as much freedom for all staff who will be responsible for maintenance of the LIS site as possible. No “filtering” of content!! The community to be encouraged to provide feedback. So staff can “act first & apologize later” – respond to feedback that the page isn’t well written or whatever. But I digress!!
Jess, I was actually saying that the public, central, disparate, departmental, whatever sections of the LIS site may desire to have designs that are different from the core Midd design, depending on what is delivered from the vendor and how that maps to the requirements for those site. But I wasn’t being particularly constructive in mentioning this, since its not really something we should be overly concerned with until we see what White Whale comes up with.
Maybe more interesting is how we’ll incorporate these designs into a unifying theme for LIS across the many systems LIS operates and communicates using. We should be getting design templates for the bloging server, but there’s also MediaWiki, the library catalog, collections databases, the subject guides, etc. The recommendation from White Whale is that Middlebury College’s presence on all web systems share unifying design elements that associate them with the college. Would we want to extend this to include LIS systems sharing comment design elements that tie them to LIS? Could this be a way to help users find our services? This could take all sorts of forms, from a logo, or a bar across the top or bottom of a page design, or even a browser extension, like the old GO search bar.
Anyway, probably too detailed for this point in the project, but that was what I was thinking about when I wrote that.
Well even if we’re not quite ready to discuss it in our meetings, I think this is still some good food for thought (so, thank you!). I think the blog is a fine place to toss around ideas.