I attended part of the LIS website team meeting today and gave a presentation of the ShadowBox theme and some of the new features that will be available in the next version including updates to author pages, more custom header options and most importantly, higher contrast text in comment fields. I also gave a preview of some new ShadowBox variations based on the new college website design. Below is a screencast from that meeting:
[middmedia achapin achapin shadowbox-lis.mp4]
How about something like this? It might be too text-y, but some explanation of why you’d want to contact these people/groups seems necessary.
eg, for Chemistry: Continue reading
Here’s the draft for LISt. OK?
The web team met recently with the LIS Area Directors to present our recommendations for the new LIS web presence.
The recommendations incorporated many hours of research and discussion (in meetings and on the blog/wiki) by team members. The recommendations were informed by user patterns, surveys and statistics, feedback from our LIS colleagues and the recommendations from White Whale. We received the enthusiastic support of the AD’s to move ahead with our recommendations.
The recommendations document can be found here.
Many thanks to you all for your valuable input into the recommendations. Stay tuned for exciting new developments!
We welcome your comments and ideas.
Thanks!
Ian, Barbara, Jim, Liz, Doreen, Jess, Carrie and Elin
The LIS Web Team
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:
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.
Please read and edit! Here it is: LIS within the IA of the College Site
Agenda for Wed 8/12:
I started the LIS Website Recommendations document a few weeks ago, based on my personal views of the project and some of the discussions we have had early on during team meetings. I will commit to working later in this week to flesh this document out more with specific references to materials which support the changes it recommends. However, here are some framing questions we can use to think about these recommendations.
What sections of this document conflict with goals of the team?
What goals of the team are missing from this document?
What changes do we need to make to these recommendations based on the survey results?
What changes do we need to make to these recommendations based on other data sources?
What resources should we reference within this document to support the recommendations it proscribes?
This is a place to coordinate discussion about the criteria we desire for the LIS site. We’ve created two sections in the wiki to store this information:
How can we combine these sections? Do we need to combine these sections?
What information from our own personal views are missing from these sections?
What information from our survey results is missing from these sections?
What information from the other analytics and analysis we’ve conducted is missing from these sections?
What information in these sections should be removed or is no longer applicable knowing what we know now?
How do these criteria allow us to meet our goals and achieve our vision?