Strategic
Responsibility/Policy
MSU's Web Task Force has been charged by the president
to advise in the area of the University's publically viewable web site. The
task force has met in its present form since April 2001. The tasks accomplished
include the following:
- drafted and approved Web Development Standards for use by MSU web site developers to aid in setting up and maintaining college, department, program, and office web sites; and
- drafted a [DOC] Web Publication Policy (41 KiB) document that has been submitted to the University Cabinet for approval.
Usability
All MSU web development planning related to information architecture, navigation, and graphic design should anticipate (and schedule) usability testing before deploying the pages or site.
Please review Usabilty Resources page and suggest others if you're aware of them.
Information Architecture
The fundamental design decision in web site development is the shape of information. Navigation and graphic design choices are limited by information presentation requirements.
Navigation
A full discussion of MSU's website navigation strategies and tactics are available on the Navigation page.
Tactical
Responsibility
MSU's Web Development Team provides the following services:
- Provide information and consulting services to University web developers.
- Develop, refine, and interpret web development standards at MSU, making them available to University web developers, and resolving standards application issues.
- Develop and maintain the University web site's Tier I and II pages.
- Extend the functionality of the Internet to MSU clients who need web applications for data collection and/or reporting for a variety of purposes (see Projects).
Search
MSU's search feature was changed June 27, 2001. It now uses the Google search engine. (The previous search engine, Swish-E, is now used only for the Communication Disorders/Stuttering site at www.mnsu.edu.)
Unfortunately, Google's search index of MSU's 30,000+ pages are broken into two sections based on the URLs searched: mnsu.edu and mnsu.edu. Currently this presents a problem for access to servers indexed under one or the other (but not both) of these URLs. Until this problem is resolved at Google, or until the web team devises another solution, search results on MSU's web sites will fall short of the team's goals.
Design Samples
- mnsu.edu tier II development/ revision
- Final homepage design page
- rev1
(use Back button to return to this page)
- rev2
(Combination demo: active links are Colleges, Academics, Administration; you may click the pages to advance through and back to this page)
- rev3 (you may click the
pages to advance through and back to this page)
- rev4
- rev5
- rev6 (use Back button to return to this page)
- application of standards for subsite development
Development environment resources
The MSU ITS web development environment is designed to provide flexibility, accessibility, reliability, and versioning control. This work area is available for collaborative development use by students, staff, and faculty working on department, office, program, or college sites. Tools available include:
Network/web:
- Development server: devweb running MS Windows 2000 Server and IIS 5.0
- Development server: devsql running MS SQL 2000 Server
- Web sites running on production servers
Hardware:
- 4 Dell Optiplex GX200 1GHz Pentium III desktop workstations w/ 19" monitors
- 2 Dell Precision 340 1.8GHz Pentium 4 desktop workstations w/ 17" monitors
- 2 Apple Macintosh G3 and G4 workstations w/ 17" monitors
- Apple Macintosh iMac teststation w/ 15" display screen
- Epson Perfection 1650 1600 x 3200 dpi 48-bit flatbed scanner
Software:
- MS Visual SourceSafe for team web development
- Macromedia UltraDev and MS Visual Studio.Net for server-side scripting
- Macromedia Dreamweaver for WYSIWYG web authoring
- Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, Fireworks, and Freehand for graphics creation/editing
