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  • Web Council - July 26, 2012
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  • Announcements

    • Next Web Council meeting will be Thursday, Aug 23, 9:00a.m. to 10:30a.m.,  Paccar Hall, Shansby Auditorium (room 192)

    • An announcement will be made shortly on when to replace the 150th logo. A new logo is in development.

    • Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit will be held at the UW October 20-21 (http://2012.pnwdrupalsummit.org/). Sign up early!

  • Mobile MyUW – Greg Koester

    • Being developed by the UW-IT Academic Collaborative Applications team

    • Features of Mobile MyUW are based on the results of the Student Experience Project

      • Students want personalization and relevance of information

      • Aim of mobile MyUW is to include the things students said they most wanted

        • List of classes

        • Weekly class schedule

        • Add schedule to personal calendar

        • See details for classes they are enrolled in

          • Titles

          • Numbers

          • Sections

          • Days/times

          • Instructors

          • Locations

          • Location on map

          • Required texts

          • Instructor information

          • Launch email client from instructor email link

          • Link to full MyUW

          • Search full MyUW, displaying results in mobile-optimized form

      • The goal is to address these needs in first release

    • Built with Django and Python (https://www.djangoproject.com/)

      • Uses Student Web Services

      • Same information already available in MyUW

  • CMS Work by the Central Web Team - Dane Odekirk and Kilian Frey

    • Big changes

      • Transitioning from Plone to WordPress

        • WordPress is simpler, lighter; we understand it better

        • Fewer people available at the UW who are skillful in working with Plone

        • Already have several sites running on standalone WordPress sites

        • Easy to manage multiple WordPress sites

        • First site in the new WordPress environment and using the new page templates will be  UW Today - http://www.washington.edu/news/. which should go public during the next week

        • New page template has new menus design

          • Accessible – keyboard accessible

          • Responsive – displays on a wide range of display sizes

        • Transition schedule

          • Working on schedule right now

          • High level information pages will move over first

          • Home page will be converted to WordPress and the new theme eventually

        • Will work to ripple design changes out to the whole campus

          • Style guide will be available soon

          • Suggestions always welcome

          • Want to provide plug-and-play, making it easy for people to use

        • Using it on your own

          • Rolling it all into a WordPress theme for those who want to run their own standalone site

            • Expect to make the theme available on Github, which will also be how updates will be made available

            • Should be available in roughly October

          • Header can be edited, putting in your own wordmark, setting background colors of menus

          • Has dynamic sidebar option

        • Discussion

          • Do you have to tighten up your content?

            • You do need to think about how your content will present on mobile devices

            • Use images responsibly – they are going to be displayed on mobile

          • Will there be a Drupal implementation

            • Will work with Drupal community on making that happen

          • Includes ability to create pagelets; a post that can be attached to a single page

          • Forms; will be able to use the Compact Form v.7 plug-in

            • An altenrative would be to use http://wufoo.com/, a commercial site, to build your forms

  • UW Alert Banner System Being Updated – Chris Heiland

    • The UW Banner Alert can be added to UW Web pages, links to an emergency blog which is located offsite (https://www.washington.edu/externalaffairs/uwmarketing/toolkits/uw-alert-banner/)

    • Current configuration tends to overload

      • When people are expecting a new alert, they connect to pages with the alert and keep reloading the page.
      • The cumulative effect of thousands of people, such as students wanting to find out if the UW will be open the next day, can overload the servers

      • To solve this problem, the emergency blog is being moved to WordPress.com

        • WordPress.com has a huge capacity to handle traffic load

        • WordPress operates through many widely dispersed servers, reducing the likelihood that a single event will bring down the blog

    • Other emergency systems work

      • Will also have a “home page light”

      • Working on getting UW alert systems to play better together

        • Banner alert

        • Alert system

        • Facebook pages

  • UW Website Accessibility Initiative – Gina Hills

    • A University-wide initiative sponsored by Kelli Trosvig (VP and CIO, UW Information Technology) and Randy Hodgins (VP for External Affairs) to develop, apply, and promote a more accessible UW Web

    • The work to make the new UW theme and templates accessible is part of this initiative

    • Much information now in the http://uw.edu/accessibility/

      • Site will be moving over to new WordPress system and theme, which includes many accessible design features

        • Site will be reorganized, more user friendly

        • Site will describe best practices for accessible Web design

        • Site will explain why we have to be accessible, what accessibility is, and how to do it

 

 

 

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