SEUL: [Fwd: (FWD) seul web site requirements]

["Pete St. Onge" <pete@seul.org>]

My pathetic attempt at a spec. :) I've emailed pertty much everyone I
remembered talking about this to, and am looking forward to tomorrow's short
irc meeting (2130 EST). I've also cc'ed this to seul-pub-www as doug
suggested.

I hope this doesn't confuse the issue. Our primary reason for wanting to do
this was to reduce the work required to maintain the site, particularly news
and other info

I refer to doug's email in the text, and I pasted it below.

Thanks!

Pete

---

I should start by explaining that I see a hierarchy here: SEUL is the main
project under which individual projects as well as what I call meta projects
(access, edu and sci) fall. Individual projects can also fall under these
meta projects.

Aaron's questions are numbered, everything below

1) what do you like about the current web site
   - we know where everything is, and we can change things easily

2) what don't you like?
   - Keeping news and pages maintained is time consuming, and this is
     my primary concern.
   - Doug's point about lack of consistant look-n-feel is a good one

3) Do you have a prototype/layout/look/color scheme you'd like?
   Perhaps you like the look of another site?
   - I'm thinking that perhaps more than one presentation style could be set
up, so that a user with a graphical browser would get one presentation, and
the lynx/links user could get a more text-oriented presentation. I don't
know of how to make this work offhand, but since we'll be hosting access, it
would be important.
   - simple layout would be good, imo
   - a template-like layout would be cool, so that we could easily change
the look of the site as required.


4) What kind of information do you want to track?  (project names,
   news, dates associated, general info on each project, people
   names/emails, etc)
   - this will differ with others, but my primary concern is making the day
to day maintenance easier, especially with respect to news. setting up all
projects to use this approach is not necessarily essential, although it
would be nice. each project should be able to opt into this if they so
desire.
   - links to our current offerings (general info, goals, software) should
be available from the mainpage


5) What information/content do you want to track for all projects?
   for starters...
   - goal(s)
   - contact
   - status
   - what project or meta project it falls under
     .. much of this would presumably be on the project's main page, so it
doesn't necessarily have to be elsewhere.

6) Do you want to centralize control of content for a few people or
   give each project control over their own destiny?  Some kind of
   mix?
   - personally, I think I'd like to see a mix; the individual projects
should be free to set things up as they please. submitted news items should
go up to the overlying projects for validation and posting on the frontpage.
the main and metaproject frontpages should be in the hands of a few people.
   - approval for posting news items to the main and metaproject pages
should be done via web interface and require authentication. individual
projects should be able to do the same

7) How do you want projects and their information organized and
   categorized?
   - some projects fall directly under the seul umbrella, others under edu,
access or sci. it would be cool to have the project group to be specified in
the info
   - last news item date
   - type of item (info, release, presence at expo, etc) and have the item 


8) Other thoughts...
   - I'd like to see each individual project being able to submit their own
news details. If their own site is enabled in this way, their own details
would go on their front page. the news item would also be forwarded to the
meta project page (access, edu or sci), where the item can be validated and
then put up on the meta project mainpage. The news item should be submitted
by default to the mainpage as well
    - frontpages should post 8-14 news items or so, with a link to a page
listing all news items available



Roger Dingledine wrote:

> ----- Forwarded message from "Aaron D. Turner" <aturner@pobox.com> >
>
> 1) what do you like about the current web site
>

It's easy to maintain (not that we do a particularly good job at that).

>
> 2) what don't you like?
>

There's no overall "look-n-feel" to the site.  Various pages follow
different styles and/or stylesheets, depending on when, how, and by whom
they were created.  We also have a lot of historical pages that haven't been
modified in a long time.

>
> 3) Do you have a prototype/layout/look/color scheme you'd like? 
> Perhaps you like the look of another site?
>

I think the hosting page that Daniel put together is nice, without a bunch
of trivial presentation hacks that get in the way of usability.  I'm
somewhat of a minimalist when it comes to web authorship, perhaps because
I'm not very good at graphical stuff.  Still, I think Occam's Razor works
here too: the simplest is generally to be preferred.

>
> 4) What kind of information do you want to track?  (project names,
> news, dates associated, general info on each project, people
> names/emails, etc)
>

All the above is nice, plus perhaps some indicator of activity level of the
project (last modification date?).  Of course, it assumes that someone is
willing to invest the time in doing the tracking and page authoring
required. Now that I think about it, the names/emails of the people
associated with each project should probably be left for the project pages
themselves rather than the general SEUL page.

We also should keep general information about SEUL, its goals, and its
offerings available from the main page, as well as links to email archives.
The email archives page should be kept up-to-date to reflect the various
active SEUL mailing lists, with some criterion for moving inactive lists
somewhere else or removing them entirely.

>
> 5) What information/content do you want to track for all projects?
>

See above.

>
> 6) Do you want to centralize control of content for a few people or
> give each project control over their own destiny?  Some kind of mix?
>

For the main site, there should be some small group with clear
responsibility for its maintenance.  For the projects, there should be
someone listed as the site maintainer who can decide to share responsibility
for it with others in the project.  But the maintainer would be responsible
for the project's website maintenance as a whole.  We should also provide a
standard SEUL CSS stylesheet (or perhaps a selection of stylesheets) that
projects can choose if they want
to look like the general SEUL site.

>
> 7) How do you want projects and their information organized and
> categorized?
>

Logically.  Seriously, there are many ways to do this.  I think Daniel's
hosting page is a good first cut at it.  I'll be happy to whine and snivel
about any system that the rest of you dream up.

>
> 8) Other thoughts...
>

Is the seul-pub-www mailing list still around?  It was for discussions of
this type.  If it is, should we continue this there or here?

--
Doug Loss                 God is a comedian playing
Data Network Coordinator  to an audience too afraid
Bloomsburg University     to laugh.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Voltaire