Tag Archives: information architecture

Website Improvements #2: Custom Redirects

Our GO service has been and will continue to be our supported way for maintaining permalinks to resources. By publishing GO links to resources online and in print, you are able to move your resources to new homes (such as a different location in the new site, a blog, or a wiki) and update the go link with the self-service GO management screens.

During the web-makeover project planning it was decided that we need to move forward with a new site architecture (where everything lives) and drop support for the old URLs from previous versions of the site that are 3-15+ years old. Most of the time links can and should be updated at their original locations, but if that is impossible (such as in a print mailing), you can now ensure that the correct link shows up on the main site’s 404 page.

404-with_link_annotated

Steps to add a link for a 404 page on the main site:

  1. Create a nice GO shortcut to the new destination if one doesn’t exist.
    Go to the GOtrol Panel and create a new go shortcut to the new destination URL.
    If a go shortcut for this destination already exists, then you can skip this step.
  2. In the GOtrol Panel, click on the ‘Create’ tab and add an alias for your shortcut from step one. The important thing here is that the alias ‘name’ is the path portion of the URL that is hitting the 404 page after the initial ‘/’.

    For example, if this URL is getting a 404 page:
    http://www.middlebury.edu/area/department/someimportantpage/default.htm
    then the alias name should be:
    area/department/someimportantpage/default.htm

    go_admin-alias

  3. Go back to the 404 page and verify that it now includes the GO link to your resource.
    404-with_link

We still recommend that you update the pages that link to the site to use their new URLs or GO links, but if that is impossible, you now have a work-around to direct users to the appropriate place.

CT Team Meeting Minutes 10/27/2009

Topic 1: Segue v1 shutdown notice.

Team ok with Alex sending out the notice he presented. Team decided that the notice should be sent to all faculty rather than a limited group. Team decided that Segue 1 should be made unavailable at the end of Fall 2009 classes and not postponed until later.

Topic 2: CT Site IA.

Team looked at the Uses categories started by Alex. After much discussion and a few changes, we agreed to use the following IA as a starting point for our build-out:
Continue reading

LIS Website Information Architecture

Team, please find the new article here, and have at it!:

LIS Website Information Architecture

(Also linked from our team wiki page.)

FYI: This follows the IA documents White Whale created for other parts of the College web redo project. It’s primarily a high-level guide to page & subpage structure, not a detailed list of page contents (though there are some content recommendations in the notes sections). See middfiles:\orgs\WebMakeover\IA Documents for examples (I used Academics when creating the wiki page.)

The One and Only – All Things LIS Blog

Voted yes on the one-blog readiness; will discuss how to launch at our next meeting.
Current categories listed below. Any change before we move ahead?

External Audience – term used TBD by vote by Fri 9/18 at 5 pm

Areas and Workgroups – use name of area as the category and use functions of the work area as tags (audience is mostly internal)

* Academic Consulting Services – research support, instruction, liaison
* Collection Management – aquire, catalog, preserve, maintain resources
* Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure – programming, systems, reporting, network
* LIS Administration – budget, planing, policy, assessment, strategy
* User Services – technology help and support, borrowing and lending, computing support, computing labs, media and event support

Institutions
* Middlebury
* MIIS
* Language Schools
* Schools Abroad
* Bread Loaf School of English
* Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
* MMLA

Teams
* Area Directors
* Curricular Technology
* Digitization
* LIS Website

LIS Quick Links

Action to be taken following meeting with WW. Come up with possible quick links based on immediate needs of constituencies.
Decide on recommended terminology and number of quick links for the college website.

List just 2?
Library
Technical Support

Or more? If more than 2 – what should they be?
Media Services
Telephone Services

Please add your comments, ideas, suggestions to this post by 5 pm on Tuesday. Final vote at our Wed meeting.

Agenda for Wednesday 9/16

Great news!
Tonya from White Whale will be able to meet with us next Wednesday at our regularly scheduled meeting time. I have changed the meeting location to Lib 221. Hope this works for everyone – this opportunity to meet with WW/Tonya came up rather suddenly. Thanks for arranging this, Ian!

Agenda
Information Architecture discussion with Tonya from WW

So that we can dedicate the full meeting to this topic, I propose that we vote on the One-Blog readiness at our Thursday meeting.

Please post suggestions for questions we’d like to ask Tonya about the site IA in the comments section of this post.

One Blog to Pool them All

Here are my initial ideas of how this could be organized.

Existing Infrastructure

We’ll take the current LISt blog, rename it to just “LIS” and grant all staff in LIS Editor access to the blog. Student workers and LIS-related people like department advisory groups will have Author access granted as needed.

Porting Content

Users and groups with existing blogs may move their content into the LIS blog by going to Tools -> Export -> Download Export file in their blog, then Tools -> Import -> WordPress -> Upload file and Import. After doing so, they should go to Posts -> Categories and use the Category to Tag Converter to change any custom categories their blog had into tags on the LIS blog.

Categories

The LIS blog will start with this set of categories:

  • Audience
    • External
    • Internal
  • Areas
    • Academic Consulting Services
    • Collection Management
    • Enterprise Technology & Infrastructure
    • LIS Administration
    • User Services
  • Institutions
    • Middlebury
    • MIIS
    • Language Schools
    • Schools Abroad
    • Bread Loaf
    • MMLA
  • Teams
    • Area Directors
    • Curricular Technology
    • Digitization
    • LIS Website

All other existing categories in the LIS blog will be changed to tags. In general, we’ll encourage the use to tags to mark things like posts that have photos in them, posts about particular workgroups, posts about particular projects, or other things that tend to have a more temporally mutable quality to them. Categories will be used chiefly for broad categories that change infrequently.

Private Blogs

The LIS blog will not be used to store private content. Groups, such as ACS, who wish to have a private blog should continue to use and maintain their blog in its present form or create new private blogs if one has not yet been set up.

Internal vs. External

Posts that are likely to be interesting only to LIS staff should be marked with the Internal category. Examples of this content might include a notice about LIS goal setting. Note that these posts would still be readable by the public, but that those subscribed to the public feed wouldn’t see them in the feed. Posts that are likely to have broader appeal, like a cookie party for students, should be marked with the External category, or both the Internal and External categories.

There will be links to both the External and Internal feeds on the blog homepage with a description of the content featured in each so that site visitors can choose how they will read about LIS.