changelog @ tengrrl.com: NCTE Web Revisions

This afternoon I'm in the second meeting on the Web revision, based on suggestions from MSU's WIDE Research Center. So far we're focusing primarily on getting terms defined and group roles determined. Our job for the next meeting is to go look at our areas of the Web site and come back with details on the user and action roles that people comes to the site with.

One of the things that bugs me about all of the sites that we have looked at as examples is the choice to use a lot of real estate at the top of the page for logos. I just don't get it. Yes, you want to identify the organization, but is it worth giving up such a huge piece of the page? I don't think so, especially for those folks working with lower resolutions. Between the tabs and menubars I have in Firefox, some of these pages end up giving at least a third of what I can see away to a big area of color with a logo. Examples: MSU, AMA, CCCC. There are ways to include the logo, still be clean and elegant, and not give up so much space.

The most interesting thing to those folks who might visit the NCTE site is the discussion of adopting folksonomy for all of the resources on the site as well as the ability to comment on anything that appears on the site. There's also a goal of having remote publishers who add news and such for the site, and whose writing will go through a filter before being published. Of course, that brings up the issue of quality control for folks on staff. It's going to be a awkward issue to work out, though it can easily be solved by demarcating visually and textually the difference between official statements and material and the shared materials posted by the general site visitors. Also discussing personalized pages, the long-discussed myNCTE pages which we have been talking about for years. Eric Crump and I discussed such things what feels like decades ago.

The hardest thing for folks to grasp seems to be the issue of action-based and role-based ways of using the site. It's just differentiated browsing. Just as we provide different ways to learning in the classroom, we have to allow different ways to get to the same information online.

Consistency is an issue for me as well. We're talking about designing whatever we need for action/role-based navigation, but so much is already set by the CCCC site. It's said that CCCC is different, but it's a real mistake to switch around branding and navigation on various parts of the same site.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006