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This week I'll talk about the website conversion. No doubt you've noticed that many parts of the university website have changed to the new look; ultimately, the entire website will need to be converted.
Our previous web design was a significant step up from what came before, but was unnecessarily complex for people who had to maintain web pages. There were already many outdated pages on the site, and that web design only made it harder to fix them. One of the top goals for the new site is to make it easy to maintain, so that correct and timely information will always be there for those who need it.
The other main goals are to make navigation easier, especially for people who use text readers and cell phones, and to simplify future design changes. The new design is also much more friendly to search engines such as Google; in the old design, search engines could not follow the sidebar links.
or want you to add a link to something?
Please let us know! Email Stewart Gilbert at gilberts@wou.edu, or me at webmaster@wou.edu. Everybody has their own favorite way to find things on the Web, and we are trying to accommodate as many of them as we reasonably can. We may not be able to make every change you suggest, but we will certainly try to make things easier for you. Unlike the old system, we are not locked into a specific site design, and can make site-wide changes much more easily.
In the old web system, the entire page design (except the sidebar menus and some of the text styles) was coded into every web page. This meant that in order to change the design, we would have to edit every single file on the website; since there are thousands of pages, this would have been an impossible task. Now we keep many elements of the design in centralized files, called "include files" because they are included in every page. This means that if we want to change the background color of every page, for instance, we just have to make the change in the include files; then all the pages on the website will instantly change as well, without us needing to touch them.
Because the new pages are coded in the PHP language instead of HTML. This is necessary to enable the include files and other needed features. Luckily, PHP pages can still have HTML code in them, so if you know HTML, you can still use it. You are not required to learn a new programming language in order to work on web pages in the new system.
If your page is in your personal webspace on your P: drive (formerly the public_html folder in your H: drive,) then you do not need to convert it. you can if you want (more on that later) but it is not required. The entire X: drive, however, will need to be converted eventually. If you have personal content on the X: drive that you do not want to convert; we can help you move it to your P: drive. Exceptions may be available for certain programs that already have their own web design, distinct from the University's.
Contact one of the following three people to get started: Stewart Gilbert (gilberts@wou.edu) in the Public Relations office, Scott Carter (carters@wou.edu) in the Technology Resource Center, or myself (webmaster@wou.edu). For many departments, part of the conversion work has already been done, but someone from the department will need to sign off on each page before we make it live.
No you don't, though both are useful. We offer two visual design tools that work well with our new web system: Macromedia Contribute and Macromedia Dreamweaver. Contribute is a simple tool that is easy to learn; if you are used to formatting text in a word processor, you already know most of what you need in order to use Contribute. Dreamweaver, on the other hand, is a much more advanced program that offers many more options, including the ability to edit source code.
No. The latest versions of both Contribute and Dreamweaver are available for free on the terminal server. To get started using them, talk to Scott, Stewart, or myself.
I only have a certain list of styles to work with. Why is that?
Because we want to keep a uniform look and feel on the website. Also, these predefined styles are designed to work with text readers and cell phones in addition to conventional browsers. And it is worth noting that the new system actually gives you more style choices than the old design.
Websmith is our tool for creating new pages. Because the new system uses include files for the top and bottom of each page, certain information (such as the page title) that is normally stored at the top of the page has to come from somewhere else. Every page in the new system also has a database entry which stores this information; that database entry needs to be created at the same time the page is.
So, when you want to create a page in the new system, instead of copying an existing page and editing it, you would go into websmith and fill out a form. When you hit submit, the page and its associated database entry are created for you. The new page loads the include files and the database information, but is otherwise blank and ready for you to paste anything into it. If you need to use websmith, we will help you; so far, most people who have used it have found it fairly simple.
That was our fault. We had been getting many complaints about the old search engine, and knew we needed to change. We were hoping that the webserver upgrade earlier this year would provide us with a better method; but the new search engine proved completely unworkable. We then turned to a different product, because it was totally customizable and would have fit well into our new design, as well as allowing many useful options such as skipping archived pages.
However, we recently realized that this system was going to take too long to set up, and too much work to maintain. Now we are going with Google's search, which some people have been urging us to do for quite some time now. You know who you are; let me take this opportunity to admit that you were right, and we should have listened to you in the first place. To see a test version of the Google search, go to " http://www.wou.edu/test/findit.php.
University Computing Services 503-838-8154 | or e-mail: webmaster@wou.edu
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