CFR Web Advisory Committee Minutes June 17, 2008 Attending: Davis, Diemer, Morrison, Moskal, Piccola Absent: Hegarty, Mehlin, Paul, Trudeau, West 1. The minutes from 5/20 and 6/3 were approved. 2. Alice announced that the progress has been unexpectedly delayed several times since the last meeting. Getting the template to behave as intended is the top priority and Jon and Alice mentioned several glitches that have been resolved since the last meeting. There are still more minor problems to fix, but once those are fixed they will be able to transfer more content to the new site template. Jon estimated that the site will be launched sometime in July, but hesitated on giving a date just in case other unexpected problems occur. 3. Jon has been working on reorganizing the database to make the data available to future applications in addition to the directories that will be available on the website. Amanda and Jon talked about cleaning up the graduate student information in the current directory. Jon hopes to add student information to the database and believes that it won’t be difficult to combine the ASP.NET pages with the new web template. 4. Amanda, Michelle and Debra will be contacting graduate and undergraduate students to find replacements for Jim Lutz and Josh Hegarty. Monkia suggested that having a student who isn’t familiar with design/development of websites could have a lot of good input for the content and user ability of the site. Furthermore, it might be helpful to have a graduate student who did their undergraduate degree at another school and aren’t familiar with the layout of the site could also be very insightful. Amanda pointed out that most graduate students are often doing research during the summer making it hard to find someone who will be around consistently. As a side note, Jon mentioned that Dan Ribeiro, who maintains the Water Center’s website, has given very constructive feedback on the redesign and might be a good addition to the committee. 5. Alice gave an update on the Trumba calendar. She had a few examples of the calendar available: http://www.cfr.washington.edu/newsite/index.shtml http://www.cfr.washington.edu/newsite/news_pubs/public_calendar.shtml http://www.cfr.washington.edu/newsite/news_pubs/in_the_news.shtml Note that the first link has a small Trumba list under the News & Events header. This particular page is not working properly yet; Alice has scheduled a conference call with Trumba’s developers to set the homepage up so that it has the flexibility we need. Monika and Amanda asked about Trumba’s ability to add events to other calendars. Trumba can add events very easily to Outlook, Google, Yahoo, AOL, iCal and Hotmail calendars. Monika also liked that the user has the ability to subscribe to our calendar and receive updates via email about new events. We agreed that the appearance is much more aesthetically pleasing than the calendars currently in use and that the features were well worth the low cost. Jon and Alice mentioned that developing the calendar in house or through Creative Communications would take longer and the features that Trumba offers would be out of the question. NEXT MEETING: JULY 1st in Anderson 107A from 2pm ‐ 3pm