www.sig Meeting Minutes
Thursday, March 9, 2006
1. Introduction of each attendee
2. Presentation of the U-M Gateway Page
1) Current Status: the redesign is ready to release and is waiting for VP of
Communication for approval
2) Gateway Features and Considerations for Redesign (what the gateway is):
a. Static
b. Remarkably ‘boring’
c. Political elements
d. On-campus Organizational Representation
e. Comply with web standards
Note: contact um-gateway@umich.edu for content changes and questions, and
you can also send feature site requests to this email address.
3) What the gateway is not:
4) The redesign is conservative:
a. The architecture of the old gateway page is not allowed to change at all
b. Completely CSS driven
c. Short turn-around: 2 months, team work
d. Goals of Redesign: more spacious, more flexible, wider, and cleaner
e. No flash any more – usability complaints
Introducing the editorial person and the server team representative for the
gateway page
5) Hardware: 7-8 servers, DNS round – robin to handle the load, Linux servers,
independent of AFS. Virtual Local Host for testing redesign pages
6) Search Engine Crawling, Index, Traffic, Usage Analysis
7) Image and Graphics: photographs from photo services, news services. Credit
is reflected by caption in the image
8) Browser: Netscape 6 is not rendering well with the redesigned portal, not
supporting all older browsers, supporting people with alternative browsers.
Text only version. IE 6.0 workaround.
9) Standard: XHTML 1.0 transitional (making it compatible boosts page rank)
10) Usability Testing: the possibility of doing it with an SI class project
11) What would you have done differently: Accessibility
12) How to use usage statistics (check the log for comprehensive info):
Audience tag, search terms
Questions:
1. Google University Search Services
-- No customized search results, depth and page structure dependable results,
incomprehensible index,
2. Web and directory search selection should be removed?
3. Content Update: few items to update on a daily basis – Spanish Gateway is self
sustaining and more dynamic
4. How is table used: table is not used for layout
5. How are the Quicklinks selected: organizational decision, usage analysis, search
page rank benefit.
6. How many pages does this gateway contain: 150 pages
7. Why are you getting rid of the site map? It is a pain to maintain and often runs
out-of-date.
8. Analyze referral data from analogs? Not all browsers report referral
9. Branding: The block M logo is recommended but not mandate for every
department/unit to use.
10. Do the Gateway Team see their work as a standard for web development on
campus?
We don’t mandate but hope people would regard the redesigned gateway pages as
a good example
The meeting concluded with the suggestion that the Gateway Team will hand over their
redesign standards to the www.sig group to form an informal guideline document for web
masters across campus. Also Patty Bradley (pattyb@umich.edu) from Public Health will
be hosting the April meeting and she is planning to invite the WATS team to talk about
web design issues.