Thanks to those of you who showed up at today's meeting about the Libraries' new homepage. As you can see, the new page is a complete re-coding of the Libraries current page. Without going into great detail about the page itself, let me answer the real questions...
What does this change mean for Web Developers?
Three letters: CSS. The current design, as most of you recall, changed the old table-based design into a CSS-based one. This allows us to make site-wide changes easily and quickly. The new design will expand our use of CSS, so if you're not comfortable with style sheets (especially absolute and relative positioning), brush up!
WDS has some books on the subject, and there are TONS of great resources available online. Check NetLibrary as well -- they have books on just about every computer-related topic.
How will the changeover to the new template take place?
WDS is now testing how to adapt the current site to the new template with minimal problems. It looks like we'll just need to replace the header, side menu, footer, and style sheet. I can think of a few areas where this might cause problems (Special Collections and Government Info come to mind), but overall things should go smoothly.
When is this going to happen?
Hopefully before Spring semester begins -- that's why the whole process of designing and vetting the page has moved so quickly.
What does this mean for the branches?
Nothing. Branch pages can remain exactly as they are. WMC may eventually decide to adapt the branch sites to the new (or similar) template, but that decision is months away, at least. For now, the changes affecting the main site need not affect the branches at all.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact any of the WMC committee members, and if you missed today's meeting, be sure to check out the second one on Thursday, January 4, 2007, from 3:00-4:00 in Amargosa.
-Michael