Slightly chagrined ... really

Today is day 14 of the IRC web site redesign. To date, I have made seven different logos, three different sets of buttons, and six different image maps for the main page. I have changed my mind about the color palette twice, modified the IRC blog colors to match, and nattered incessantly about the page to anyone brave enough to enter my domain while the effort is in process. I have even made sure to ask opinions of people who will not simply tell me what they think I want to hear, updated the boss regarding progress, and solicited opinions from a professional graphic artist and the university web master. Last, but not least, I have tested the sample pages in IE, Mozilla, Netscape and Safari (a friend's contribution), looked at the sample page and graphics on three different pc's and a mac (same friend), and checked four different monitor's to judge how all the elements appear on large and small displays.

All of this and I have two pages done.

I had a quick email response, actually two of them, from the university Webmaster this morning. Even out of town this week, she answered my inquiry regarding a check of the web page design. Her response was gracious and included the following request; just send me the link and I'll look at it this morning. Yes indeed, that made me look brilliant. I replied quickly, restated my thanks, and included the correct address. She mentioned a couple of things I originally considered changing, but did not. One was to remove a jpeg of some text on the page and use simply text. Even though the jpeg text box (for want of a better discription) was used to make all the text be the same, logo, image map, introductory welcome text, the paragraphs were not 509 compliant. I either needed to adjust the "alt img" tag to reflect the entire paragraph, or work out a way to use simple text in the table data field. I removed the picture and use simple text. The second recommendation was to adjust the links to move to another page and not open a new page. I had already made that change because when checking things at home last evening, I realized how much I hate pages that continually open new windows when I don't want one. It definitely makes navigation more difficult. She told me the page looked nice.

I can live with nice.

Tomorrow some more work on the Internet resources page and some tweaking to the secondary pages. With a little bit of luck, I'll be able to start the change over in early November. I will have to burn a copy of the existing page for my records, make any updates that would be pertinent through the end of the term, like hours update calendars, and start the building of the site. It means making a list of all existing pages, images and pdfs and determining what stays, what goes, and what needs redone beyond the update.

Tags: Academic library web sites, Image maps, Web design, Web page checks