Yesterday we launched a refresh of the online Campus Directory as apart of our efforts to remediate websites that are not accessible. The update looks more or less the same visually, but there’s much more exciting stuff happening under the hood including a sprinkling of the hCard Microformat where applicable.
Years ago in an interview I was asked how I would solve the university’s web consistency problem. At the time, the thought was “good luck!” In an environment with a decentralized web site, it seemed unlikely that content management would happen. That question has been asked once again, but now we’re in a better position to answer that question: “How do you manage the Chico State website?” Here are my personal thoughts on how to approach this problem.
Accessibility has been a driving force behind the urgency to find a solution for web management. The need to ensure that all of our pages are accessible along with the desire to streamline the process of creating websites has been combined under a new Web Governance plan. In the coming months, committees will be formed and discussions will take place about where the future direction of the Chico State web presence and how we will get there. Below, is a diagram of the problem as I see it and how I would go about implementing a solution.
A very subtle change occurred on campus today. No, it wasn’t the mysterious JunkMail Digests that appeared in our inbox, rather a step forward toward a better future.
At the request of Public Affairs, we updated the Public Facilities page. With the ATI we’ve been cleaning up some of the pages on the campus web server as we go just to make sure we’re covering our basis. I noticed that the Public Facilities page was using a University template that appeared to be from the late 1990’s.
So, I cleaned-up the page and made it accessible and valid HTML, etc. In addition, I tossed the content into one of our “beta” templates that’s built upon the YUI Reset/Fonts/Grids foundation.
We hope that this foundation will eventually be made available to other web contributors on campus. Right now, we’re still finding corner cases and looking for ways to abstract CSS into components for more of an ala carte option. (more…)
Lets look at the Academic Calendar for fall 2006 for a moment. Would you rather have the page marked up with microformat hcal information, have the information available as XML (RSS & Atom), or in iCal format?
Me? I’d take XML first…but then I’m an edge case.
Today we saw a preview of the new English Department website that featured a directory listing of faculty members. Here’s an example sample of some of the markup for one faculty member
If we add a few classes to this existing structure (plus a few @span@s) we could make the site microformat compatible.
Bam! Microformat compatible.
