ACoS web pages: item 2 on the Agenda for a meeting on 7th June 2001

Discussion points

What have other Committees and Working Groups done?

Our site is now the most well developed. Three groups have nothing on their sites. A couple have information in four or five sections. No-one has developed anything innovative!

Problems developing the site

1. Cumbersome update procedure

There are six stages to getting a page on the site or updating a page:

1. Create/update page (I use Dreamweaver which is one of the market leaders in web management software)
2. FTP page to the ULCC server - making sure you put the pages in the test_html folder!
3. Login to the ULCC update service.
4. Preview page (this doesn't work properly).
5. Install your page.
6. Test your page on the live server.

If you then notice that something minor needs changing you have to go through the whole procedure again! When you already know how to manage a web site, the ULCC update procedure is cumbersome, removes a lot of control and makes the site harder to manage. If I could use Dreamweaver fully this would streamline the process:

1. Create/update page
2. Upload page from within Dreamweaver
3. Test page on the live server

This is something which probably can't be changed but it does make updating the site more time consuming than it needs to be!

2. Template

In order to manage the growing number of pages on the site I will need to create extra directories within the site to organise the information. This is made very difficult by the set up of the template.

The header and footer are made up of images and links to other pages on the SCONUL site. These links are relative, this means they only work when the page is in the correct position relative to the directory that the images files are stored in. If I create another directory within the Staffing section of the site and use the current template to create pages to put in this new directory, the links in the header and footer will not work. Also the actual buttons will not appear because the links to these images are also relative! To complicate matters further for each button on the header there are two images so that when someone passes their mouse over a button it swaps to another image (pretty but useless!). To correct all these relative links so that they would work from another directory I would need to make over 25 changes! The template would have been better designed with absolute links (the complete URLs) to allow for the development of the site.

I initially tried to create a separate directory for the minutes, but gave up because of this problem!

3. Style sheet.

The look of the site is controlled by a style sheet. This is fine - but everyone preparing pages for the site needs to know the contents of the style sheet and understand how it will effect the appearance of the page when it is loaded. Otherwise you get some very strange results!

To get around this I have removed the link to the style sheet from the minutes pages to ensure what I see is what appears on the site! I also had problems with the style sheet when loading pages - in the end I had to replace the relative link to the style sheet with an absolute link (the complete http address).

What is missing on the ACoS site?

• Terms of reference
• Useful links

Can we fill these gaps?

Ideas for development

These ideas were included in some of the literature passed to me by Julia:

• Events - reports from participants
• Dates of future meetings
• Margaret Coutt's article on ACoS
• Examples of things the Committee has pump primed in the past
• How to organise and event guidelines

  What do we want to proceed with? Are there any other ideas?

Jackie Skinner, June 2001