Friday, 7 March 2008

hard times ahead

Easter is in sight, early this year and the interview with the site manger, Richard at the UWE sports centre is waiting to be transcribed. There were some useful pieces of information that I picked up that should give me enough to report mainly the fact that web standards are now being considered by the deans now and that there is a CMS on the way.

Purpose to provide and overview of what the site does and look at how its managed then future

Overview Looked at the style guide etc. understand it to

Centre

Folklore about who owns what they operate under house services estates, service driven,

Purpose of the site

Student service body of 25,000 to give them and the community staff as well as locals somewhere to do sport

Membership is 80% students 20%staff and the odd random people who live nearby

Site guided by being a sub site of uwe it just provides info to users

not a commerce other than provide information the audience is predominantly students aimed at providing info to students.

Do you need to expand?

The university. Have a commercial responsibility to the uni, prices are reasonable and the quality of service is good the public pay a bit more and they are seasonal too i.e. an opportunity to make money there.

Public will look at it, external clubs will look it Heartbeat and f…. clinic . the provision must be there. Needs to look corporate, don’t need to attract new members . the village students pay gym membership out of their rent. Talking about the gym. The hall is full of student clubs every week.

Don’t need the website to do promotion , the regeneration pitch university market to national Olympic association not through the website but face to face. Not in the business of being number one on google

Technology and tools

There was a very small sports centre. The website was controlled centrally 2001 richard had been managing a site at another institution. There was very little traffic because of the expansion then having a better website is better e.g. a photo of

Uses dreamweaver and ftp to upload to remote or on site his copy of dreamweaver

Did you design the site?

Derived from IT sportie CSS web engine that runs through epg (ethical policies group in charge of corporate look ) produce the style sheet – does n’t have to worry about the accessibility of menus of the left. 10% of his job is managing the site hence . small component which is why it is text driven thereis not the demand to make it moreat the memoment full in term time anyway drop in student numbers when they look to promote for example at the weekends / holiday they goes direct to government body and people through htewebsite will be able to download the dvd. OMNI making a video that will be showcaseing the centre.

Governance

No one has access they don’t want multiple people to one site 4 changes to make ath te moment . Various services e.g. operations, gym, clear divisions around the services on the site. If they want to change they have a word form (that is emailed to me) these are guidelines e.g. 4MB gif, plain text etc. what you

Guidelines for Publishing Material to the UWE Sport Website

In accordance with the in-house policy of the UWE Academic Technology Group, all University websites are currently undergoing review, in order to make them accessible to all members of the wider university community, using a wide range of browser software and accessibility aids.

In simple terms, the emphasis will be placed on text driven pages, limited use of images, and the creation of simple, uncluttered pages.

To this end, those wishing to post information on the UWESport site should adhere to the following guidelines.

1. Modification of pages will infer “responsibility” for that page – for example opening times, exercise classes, NGB courses, AAG applications etc,. It is the responsibility of staff to review pages relating to their particular area periodically to ensure that posted information is up to date.

2. All information to be posted must arrive in a plain text format.
Tables, images (unless strictly necessary), animations, clip art and so on, will not be posted
Where absolutely necessary, images may be submitted in JPEG format, as a separate file ideally no greater than 100Kb (to ensure rapid loading of pages where images are used).

3. Submissions should be electronic via the form attached and sent via email to Richard2.Bennett@uwe.ac.uk

The form requires the following information to be completed
i) the exact page URL (webpage address) to be updated
ii) details of whether the submitted information should replace, or supplement that already posted on the page.
iii) the date at which the new information will expire (if necessary)
iv) updates will take place each Friday; therefore submissions should arrive by 5pm Thursday evening for inclusion

4. Complex information
Extensive information may need to be split over several, simple pages for reason of clarity and speed of loading. Please discuss any requirements prior to submission of information, particularly before undertaking an extensive project to avoid time consuming modification and re-working of information prior to publishing.

5. Information for download (application forms, flyers etc) should be submitted in Adobe Acrobat format only.

6. For ease of recognition and transfer, authors should utilise either Times New Roman or Arial fonts, with a black typeface, in no less than 10pt font.


UWE Sport Website Modification Request

NOTE: website updates take place on Friday – submissions should arrive no later than 5pm Thursday evening for inclusion on Friday’s update.

Name:


Address of page to be updated:


Date this update expires:


Should old information be deleted?

YES

NO

Or supplemented?

YES

NO


Information to be Posted:

It is more hassle as Richard is competent at Dreamweaver. They don’t know about the rules for mobiles etc. regarding accessibility for mobiles etc. got the right text engines on the main site. Do we call it UWE or University of West of England. The standards tries to deal with that by having only one person .in charge

The web standards has been replaced and called the web management group been elevated to director level as they had no power to enforce change. Only recommend or a forum for good practise.

Art media design. Want to have a nice flash website their website would look great on a high speed connection. There is alegal responsibility to make the site look good fbe and cems have their own servers and they do their own thing. It runs of fbe servers and they have the staff to man their own webservers

METRICS

Not because I don’t want to but can’t. Sawmill is a marketing product that the university use for metrics. Richard cant measure hits. Does that annoy him? He says not commercially driven, so OK.

The CMS is coming UWE-wide. It will change how everything is done tying all the loose ends together. They put courses up for education and is downloading.

Doesn’t give any extra thought to design. So that headings are ok for screen readers etc. put in the code inspector.

Stuff comes up around tables is nature of the data which is tabular. CSA will do audits on the sites to make sure they are accessible

Q: Does anyone use a reader on the uwe site?

Student affairs do an audit if nothing works then they get pulled up. Marketing do it from an up to date angle.

Previous stuff

Web2.0 – will it impact on them it will be university wide w

Sharepoint has been installed toe in the water with that .

Mobile computing – in theory you can do it. They are not interested in browsing critical information on the mobile.m They use fixutes live. Many universities are using it . hes not sure its compliant , its easy to use so that the members of staff can do the input/output andn table management . It doesn’t work in mobile mode. Considering it’s a commercial site they are paying for is it that good? Go with the flow. The students don’twant to see a handbuilt table.

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