1995-01-18: Review UNC-CH Home Page

From hallman@gibbs.oit.unc.eduFri Feb 10 08:43:37 1995
Date: Thu, 9 Feb 1995 17:25:54 -0500
From: Judy Hallman
To: web-walkers@unc.edu
Subject: Summary of Jan 18 Web-Walkers meeting

Summary of January 18 Web-Walkers meeting
on the UNC-CH Home Page

Next meeting:
February 15: Review UNC-CH style guide

This was a very informal meeting -- general discussion of the
UNC-CH Home Page.

Someone said that image loading is slow. There was discussion
about how to turn off images and a suggestion to add this
information into the help for new users.

Netscape is available from sharenet.oit.unc.edu.
For Windows, go to net/winsock/apps/netscape.
For Macs, go to net/Macintosh/netscape

[corrected Feb. 10] Wendy Parker is having problems loading the
staff jobs listing; it is large and crashes her PC. She has had better
results by bookmarking that file and going straight to it without
going to the UNC Home Page

Hallman said that now that the Staff and Faculty sections
have been split, the worst sections are "Welcome...,"
"Departments and Organizations," and "Recreation, events, and
calendars." (Well, actually, there are more -- the Global
resource section needs a better name and better stuff in it,
and it's not easy to get to UNC System resources.)

The Welcome section is weak. Hallman met with Scott Jared
(Publications Services); he will try to find some good
material for this section and help with its organization.
Weather information is buried at the end of the section. It
was suggested that we move weather out to the Home Page,
perhaps with a small icon in the bottom left corner,
replacing the date. Thomas will look into doing that.

We need to find a better presentation for Departments and
Organizations -- three views were proposed: alpha, alpha
within Academic Affairs and Health Affairs, and by
organizational structure. A search option would also be nice.

The Recreation, events, and calendars sections also need
better organization. There currently are two pages -- one for
students and one for faculty and staff. They are essentially
the same, except the student page has a few additional items.
The pages are long and it is hard to find things in them --
especially OIT training classes.

We talked about possibly having a section on campus life
under the Welcome page.

Someone pointed out that things people go to often should be
in their bookmark files. Some people put in their home pages
links to things they use a lot.

With regard to personal home pages, Mary Overby will look
into providing linkable URLs for home pages in the UNC-CH
Email ID Database Lookup, where people currently look up e-
mail addresses and phone numbers. An update facility could be
provided, like the one for e-mail address. Tom Rutledge
described the proposal to have personal home pages on the
free e-mail machine, coming out of the current disk space
quota of 3 Meg. NSF would be used to connect the pages to the
WWW server on Ra.

This lead to considerable discussion about potential dangers
from personal home pages and possible University liabilities.
This is an area of concern on most campuses that have Web
servers.

Scott Mebust briefly described the work he is doing to
generate HTML pages for Physics faculty from a FoxPro
database.

We do not have topics for the March and later meetings. Some
suggestions are:

Sybase and the Web (Mary Overby would lead)
Translators to HTML
Copyright
HTML editors

What are your preferences?

Atttendees:
Lea Blanton, Cont. Ed.
Andy Broughton, Soc. Work
Kathleen Crook, Sheps Center
Chuck Fennimore, CARES
Judy Hallman, Office of Information Technology
Tom Hocking, Morehead Planetarium
Doris Jarrell, OIT
Nancy Jesser, OIT
JJ Kim, Soc. Work
Ken Langley, OIS
Scott Mebust, Physics
Mary Overby, ADP
Wendy Parker, AHEC
Glen Piper, OIS
Tom Rutledge, OIT
Kathy Thomas, OIT
Iosif Vaisman, Pharmacy
Ken Yow, VC/GSR
Weifan Zheng, Pharmacy