Web Administration devBlog

The last web developer meeting was on 06.24.2011. It was held at Pugh Hall Rm 210 and was hosted by Daniel Westermann-Clark. In case you missed it, or you missed a link that was mentioned, then you are in luck. The notes are posted below for your convenience.

Priscilla Chapman and Carl Perry E-Learning services, LSS team

Implementing JQuery mobile on the LSS website.
Sakai course views are okay, but still working on fully functional tools such as assessments. The option to switch to regular site view is available.
They are using the UF template from Daniel and adapting to fit needs. Daniel said a more official template will soon be in the works with Phase II of the process creating mobile standards/policies. IT directors are discussing it.

Jodi Chase Facilities, Planning and Construction

Redesign for the UF Stars website entailing front and backend aspects. Hope to launch new site by July-August.
Campus Map feedback has been requested in order to improve the functionality. Once feature request, mentioned by Dan Stoner would be the ability to link to a particular building in the map.
Jodi says they will look into using Google map API.

Dan Stoner Database Admin Design, Construction and Planning

Using a “Homegrown” Perl Framework used for generating reports and other data related tasks from the website. If a suitable Perl CMS is found, then a redesign may be in the works.

Daniel Web Services

Aside from the Mobile UF work, there is talk of a website redesign for UF. It may only be an interim homepage for UF without changing the current content. When there is more information, it will be shared.
If a new design is decided on, we will also update templates for faculty and staff to use as well.

Al Kirby University Relations

The UF redesign mockups have been narrowed down to three possibilities. The next Web Committee meeting is on July 07^th and Al hopes to have one design to submit for approval. The mockups display the homepage with more relevant content, focus on Athletics, and marketing research news stories etc, to focus more on the individual benefits.

Al is also going through a tutorial regarding adaptive design from alistapart.com using HTML5 and CSS3. You can see the tutorial work in progress here. It has good multi-device support and degrades nicely, but does not work in IE7 (which he isn’t worried about since his target audience that should have up to date browsers.).

James, Jeff and Shawn HSC Web Team

James:
Orange and Blue WordPress theme revamp. Goal is to update the theme in three weeks. Using JS library called modernizr that helps building HTML5 and CSS3 websites.
Shands.org replacement redesigned with Drupal 7. See the progress at http://test3.med.ufl.edu/. Might make the theme open source with approval from Carlos.

Shawn:
Evaluating HSC audience for the redesign and working on Plugin development on WP and Drupal.
Using version control GUI called GIT.
Another SVN program call Tortoise SVN was mentioned as well.

Jeff:
He is currently researching SEO, usability and accessibility for the redesign.
His main project now is Social Media. Want to incorporate accounts from Facebook, Twitter etc into the website at UF and Shands.

Adrian Gritz Web Services

Learning the WordPress loop and playing with plugins.

Wendy Cason Web Services

Creating Print design work for Academic Technology.

Jesse Schmidt Web Services

Updating some WordPress templates to Web 3.0 and working on IT website updates.

Erika Tompkins Web Services

Making sure the Summer B online courses are ready to open Monday. Working on updating the CITT website.

The following is a guest post from Jeff Stevens, webmaster of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Jeff recently attended the Higher Education Web Development Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio and volunteered to share material he learned at the conference with the larger UF community.

Content strategy, the practice of planning content creation, is key to an effective website, explains Rick Allen (@epublishmedia).

“The moment you add content to a website, you become a publisher.” Allen explains. “Shouldn’t you act like one?” (more…)

The following is a guest post from Jeff Stevens, webmaster of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Jeff recently attended the Higher Education Web Development Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio and volunteered to share material he learned at the conference with the larger UF community.

Georgiana Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy) of Tufts University spoke at her session on the concept of content curation. Content curation does not supplant content creation – rather it is the harnessing of content already available. Curation supplants the older model or website content, aggregation.  Aggregation simply delivers too much content to the audience.  Curation allows for the selection of the best content available, and then contextualizes it to make it relevant and engaging to the audience. You can’t bank your content model solely on curation, but it supplements and sharpens what you do. (more…)

The following is a guest post from Jeff Stevens, webmaster of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Jeff recently attended the Higher Education Web Development Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio and volunteered to share material he learned at the conference with the larger UF community.

Several sessions took a hard look at the complexities and challenges faced in an institution-wide redesign. In “Put People First and Everything Else Will Come Together”, Jeff Abuzzahab, Web and Multimedia Lead of the University of Minnesota, and Ryan Warren Chief of Operations at the University of Minnesota, gave, looked at how a redesign can be impacted by being combined with the physical merging of separate entities. (more…)

The following is a guest post from Jeff Stevens, webmaster of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Jeff recently attended the Higher Education Web Development Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio and volunteered to share material he learned at the conference with the larger UF community.

Steve Krug (@skrug), author of Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, presented the keynote for the conference. He presented tips for doing quick and fast usability tests using Camtasia that can fit within the limited budgets and scopes of most higher education development shops. (more…)