Graphic identity; site visibility

[Richard Wiggins]

Tami-Jo,

Speaking as someone who launched a university on the Web in April 1993, and who has watched the evolution of the entire campus Web presence, I can see both sides of the argument in terms of imposing a look and feel...  I recently visited the local community college and was impressed by the professional, Web-based kiosk in major buildings, offering a single directory to all major services.  I asked myself "Why can't a university do this?" and came up with two answers: 1) Because it's a university and 2) Some do, but I bet a lot of college and departmental webmasters don't like it.  

One college at our university has adopted a consistent look and feel for all college and departmental Web pages, even down to the faculty.  (Individual faculty can of course vary their own personal pages.)  I think this imparts a sense of coherence and professionalism to the whole college.  I bet some students and faculty were influenced in coming here because of this site.  The consistent layout also simplifies navigation.  But I wonder if the imposition of the standard ruffled any feathers?  See http://cas.msu.edu/

...

You were concernced about your site's visibility within the university and imposed look-and-feel.  There are other issues of visibility -- to non-traditional browsers, and to spiders.  Twice recently I have discovered sites at my university that employ Javascript mouseovers for all internal navigation links.  The result is these pages are invisible to spiders, and invisible to talker technology used by people with visual impairments.  The sites were substantially redesigned by folks with a lot of coding talent, but they could have been more sensitive about accessibility.

I viewed your page in a text-only browser, and it did a pretty good job of decoding your image map.  Other sites that use pure Javascript with no graceful degradation can make pages that are virtually invisible other than to graphical browsers.

As more people learn Javascript and as more authoring tools enable mouseovers, we're going to see more and more pages that are inaccessible in this way.  That's at least as important an issue as how the rest of the institution links to your site....

/rich


---------------------------

From: "Tami-Jo M. Eckley" <eckleyt at mville.edu>
Subject: library - 0  /  college - 1


Hi folks,
I am sending an you all an update to my long ago problem of having to incorporate a "splash page."  We have been living with the splash page and the inevitable has just happened.  We have been told that we must conform to the corporate image (who are we kidding, here!) and use the college banner on all of our pages.  At least this time our newly hired college webmaster is willing to compromise with me on the design of the banner!  Unfortunately, even with our using the banner - they still want that splash page!  Uggh.  And on top of that - I had just created a newly designed home image which everyone so far loved (although I do need to create a text only link as well).  Oh well, I can use it on my resume...

http://www.mville.edu/library/newsite.htm

--
Tami-Jo Eckley
Electronic Services & Media Librarian
Manhattanville College Library
Purchase, New York 10577
http://www.mville.edu/library
Tel:(914) 323-5274
Fax:(914) 694-8139
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Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
http://www.netfact.com/rww  wiggins at mail.com
517-349-6919 (home office)  517-353-4955 (work)  
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