Note of the WebForum meeting held on 11 December 2002

[Download the PowerPoint slides of the main presentations (456Kb) and the Bartlett presentation (3.9Mb)]

The meeting concentrated on 2 major projects Ð the development of a new look and structure for UCL Online and the development of central Content Management Services.

Introduction to the work of the Working Party on Web Structure
Professor Roland Rosner

The Web and Intranet Steering Group (WISG) formed the Working Party on Web Structure (WPWS) in December 2001 to look at the structure and design of the central UCL pages and at content management issues.

WPWS produced a report to WISG recommending the restructure of the top level pages with the creation of target audiences, the use of a Content Management System (CMS), and that a consistent style and menuing needed to be addressed.

WPWS established 3 project groups to look in detail at Content Management Systems, Visual and Production Design and eXtensible Mark-Up Language respectively.

Introduction to the UCL Online Design and Structure
Jeremy Speller

It was decided to redesign the UCL Web site given the revision to the Special Educational Needs Act in 2001, which required all publicly-funded bodies to ensure their web-sites could be accessed by all users, and the WPWS Report’s recommendations were supported by WISG.

Central divisions and Faculty Information Support Officers were strongly encouraged to work with WPWS to adopt the new framework. Departments would be encouraged and helped if they wished to adopt the new framework. Guidelines, templates and support would be available from the UCL Web Unit in due course after the central site had been launched.

The Registrar’s Division, CHIME and Web Forum pages were existing examples of the new design. The development site at: http://www.wu4.reg.ucl.ac.uk/build2/ could be accessed by UCL staff to see how the new site design was progressing. The redesigned site would be launched on 31 January 2003.

Behind UCL Online: Structure and Navigation
Paula Speller

The Registrar’s Division Web site was demonstrated to show the benefits of a CMS in terms of structure and navigation. In particular, multiple pages did not have to be stored on the server as material only needed to be updated once for all locations. The Registry site required low maintenance and made use of Dreamweaver and existing software to create a consistent template across the site.

Behind UCL Online: Accessibility and Standards
Neil Martin

Web standards were technologies such as XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and DOM (Document Object Model).

The key aspect of web standards was the separation of style and content. The advantages of web standards were: an inclusive design, device independence and repurposing of content; better control over style; reduction of costs and time consumption, and the long-term viability of content.

The Web Standards used in the new UCL web design were XHTML, CSS and the Web Accessibility Standard. XHTML was the latest version of HTML and provided highly structured headers, paragraphs, and lists; CSS allowed the appearance of HTML to be changed in terms of visual design by control of fonts, colour, positioning and layout, and Web accessibility was now a legal requirement.

Validation tools allowed users to check that their web materials met the required specification. Dreamweaver MX had an HTML validator and an accessibility validator. The Worldwide Web Consortium had an HTML and CSS validator at http://validator.w3.org. Bobby was a tool which could validate webpages against the Web Content Accessibility guidelines at: http://bobby.watchfire.com

Useful links for further information on web standards were at:
www.webstandards.org
www.alistapart.com
www.w3c.org/wai/
www.techdis.ac.uk

Introduction to Content Management at UCL
Anthony Peacock

A CMS could provide a flexible development framework that enabled information integration, dynamic web views and delegation of responsibility for content.

The Content Management System Project Group oversaw 3 pilot projects within the Bartlett, Faculty of Engineering Sciences, and Registry to test CMS options. The outcome of these projects revealed Zope as the favoured CMS solution with open-source software. It was intended to have a UCL supported Zope system server for UCL central pages, which would be run by the UCL Web Unit and Information Systems, and the development of the service for other users.

Content Management at UCL: The Bartlett and Engineering Projects
Bob Sheil and Marco Federighi

The Bartlett and Engineering projects showed the advantages of using a CMS in their Web site design for administrative functions.