NC State Web Strategy Team
Meeting Minutes - September 29, 2005

Present: Matt Cupach, Keith Stoner, Mike Renock-Welker & Betty Wells Absent: Peg Moir, Nikki Workman & Bob Matney * College Hotels Guide - Mrw asked the group if anybody wanted to make the pro case for the College Hotel Guides participation after a couple of weeks to consider it. The Team was unanimously in favor of not participating in the College Hotels Guide. It was discussed that it was crossing a line in for-profit collaboration that the group is not ready to go over. Instead, it was recommended that a link be added to the site for the Mansfield area Chamber of Commerce or Convention/Tourism Board. MRW will draft up this new link and notify College Hotel Guides of our decision. * Template v. Organic Pagemastering - Mrw stated that the current pagemastering program was very uneven in its effectiveness across the site and while he was not quite on board a "Cookie cutter" template, a decision needs to be made. After further discussion, the idea of a cycle of areas to focus on sprucing up and redesigning was revisited. It was also not known what could feasibly be done with a template but some other option to provide for lower impact pagemastering is something the group is in favor of. The Team decided to pursue a complimentary strategy of seeing what can be developed for a template and also getting a rotation of focusing on a particular site. Mrw will work with Bob and bring some options back on the template as well as a draft list of sites for establishing a rotation. * New Roadmap Draft Working Over:  -ADA & 508B Accessibility -- Team agreed this is a priority but the devil is in the details. Mrw will investigate what we can do with in-house software and tools to automate this process and report back to the group. Other options include 3rd party software or lots and lots of intern hours. -Foundation/Fund Raising/Press & IR Sites -- Team agreed this was again a priority, especially the Alumni piece. Ideas were briefly floated about how the Alumni site could leverage technology to automate some tasks (data collection, networking/community, donation) to compensate for the meager alumni staffing. Betty will talk with her group and bring a proposed timeline and milestones back to the Team. -Redesign Homepage & Navigation Bar -- Mrw outlined various pressures that are driving a redesign of the homepage but the navigation also will need to be redesigned as well. Mrw mentioned the bullet points in the draft roadmap as a starting point notes, but he also tasked the rest of the team to bring a "wish list" of what objectives they would like the redesign to achieve to the next meeting. -3rd Level Webpage orientation -- Mrw highlighted the need for a "in this section" or "See also" or "related links" element in the 3rd level of the website, that is once you get beyond a 2nd level main page (such as Admissions or Cashier's Office or Engineering Divison). To help make this a bit more clear, Mrw will bring a draft mock-up or examples of this back to the group at the next meeting. -NCSC template -- see earlier item -Revisit web style guide -- Mrw will share link with group and put this on the agenda for next meeting -Expanding Web Staff -- Betty volunteered Nikki to help do more work on the site. -Establish yearly review cycle for each office/departmental site -- see earlier item -Develop a list of question for ongoing usability testing -- Mrw tasked group to each bring some questions about our current site and question they would like to get answered about how users are using the site or areas where they are encountering problems. This can be a core for ongoing usability testing research for improving the site's user experience. - Integration of CD materials with Web -- Betty brought up the suggested goal of recycling material form the new CD to integrate/jazz up the website. Specifically, the virtual tour section of the site concerned her. Keith and Mrw will look at this and bring ideas back to the group on feasibility of this. * Next Meeting: Thursday, October 6, 3pm, Kehoe Ctr, Matthew's Office 221 Kehoe