Lincoln University Information Technology

Contents

Article

The Lincoln University Web Team

Development and maintenance of the university web site is a distributed responsibility with many individuals contributing content to the site's various sections. Overall design and structure though, are the responsibility of the Web Team. In this article, Web Team members are identified and several ongoing projects are introduced.

The Web Team

• Sam Pressley, Director of Marketing and Communications guides the material presented on the Home Page.
• Guy Fox, Graphic Artist handcrafts the material on the home page, and creates new versions of the look and feel for the top levels of the site.
• Nancy Evans, Director of the Instructional Media Center maintains many of the internal pages and assists other content providers in maintaining their pages.
• Steve Carol, Chief Information Systems Technology Officer is responsible for the underlying server technologies.

Projects

• Evolution of the Look and Feel
  Guy has been making incremental, evolutionary changes in the layout of the home page and the common elements on the site's top level pages (headers, footers, navigation, etc.) Sam has input to the overall look, as does Nancy; Nancy and Steve have input to the structural and navigational design.
• OmniUpdate
  Nancy has the lead on OmniUpdate, a content management system from WebSite ASP, Inc. OmniUpdate is a service hosted off campus, where authorized users can create web pages for the unversity's site based on templates that Nancy and Guy have designed. Pages can be forwarded through an approval process or be published immediately by the editor, to the production web server on campus. Pages can include standard elements that are modifed separately. In this way a navigation bar, for example, that is unique to a department but common among all that department's pages, can be held in in a standard place and updated once. When the navigation bar is published to the production web server, the changes will be reflected in all pages that include that bar.
• Intranet
  An Intranet site is under development, with features oriented toward faculty and staff rather than toward external audiences. Steve is currently taking the lead on the Intranet.
• Blog Experiment
  A Weblog, or "blog" is essentially a place to write and archive stories, and to allow readers to comment on them. Blogs are popular with professional journalists and also with individuals who sometimes write things that people are interested in reading and discussing. Many blogs though, wind up dying on the vine. Steve has mounted a blog experiment for the Intranet site, since in our case blog software has several attractive features: 1) it's free. We're currently experimenting with the MovableType system. 2) it provides structure for topic "threads" - new blogs can be created for whatever topics we like. 3) it allows many editors to create stories, and everyone to comment. 4) it is easy to use for simple writing, especially where we are primarily interested in content rather than look and feel.