4th Annual HighEdWeb Conference

Rochester, NY, June 23-24, 2003

Session Abstracts and Presentation Materials

DESIGNING WITH WEB STANDARDS
Jeffrey Zeldman, Happy Cog Studios
In the web's first decade, we learned to solve today's problems at tomorrow's expense. As each new incompatible browser was released, we retooled our sites at ever higher costs in a futile effort to deliver our content while avoiding obsolescence. But that build-now, pay-later approach is no longer productive or even necessary. Designing and building with web standards simplifies production and greatly lowers its cost, while delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Jeffrey Zeldman, web designer, author, and co-founder of The Web Standards Project, will explore the history of browser-driven design and explain how standards can solve today's problems without generating worse dilemmas downstream.

WEB DESIGN ON A SHOESTRING (6.3MB .ppt)
Carrie Bickner, New York Public Library
Budgets for .edu web sites are not what they used to be, and web developers are being asked to do much more with much less. Resources that we could once pluck from trees are now hard to find. Our workloads, however, have not decreased. The specialization of the dot-com era has faded, and we now find ourselves responsible for information architecture, design (13KB .pdf), markup, copyediting, and project management (7KB .pdf). But you can build great sites on a small budget. Learn the techniques for building professional sites on a shoestring.

MAKING RICH MEDIA ACCESSIBLE
Andrew Kirkpatrick, WGBH
While access to basic Web content has improved dramatically, ever-increasing amounts of rich media online present significant barriers for people with disabilities. The Access to Rich Media project at the National Center for Accessible Media is researching barriers, developing strategies, and sharing solutions to help developers and content producers address this issue successfully. This session will provide examples and practical advice for creating rich media that is accessible to people with disabilities. Examples will include Real media, QuickTime, Windows media, Flash, Director, Authorware, SVG, PDF, and more.

THE POWER OF DREAMWEAVER WORKFLOW (6.01MB .pdf)
Chris Roberts, Macromedia
From brochure sites to rich applications, Dreamweaver lets us collaborate with our clients and partners like no other tool. Chris Roberts, Supervisor of Interactive Services, will discuss his experience with the product, some tips for best practices and ideas through case studies that Educators can better use this tool to build bridges within their schools and better colloborate with those outside their hallowed halls.

ACCESSIBILITY UNPLUGGED: TAKING A BIGGER PERSPECTIVE
Bud Kraus, TryNet
What's beyond the understanding and implementation of accessibility standards and guidelines? What values do we impart as content producers that build or destroy the relationship between us and users? Bud takes us on his overview on the imperatives of Accessibility As Design Construct.

COMMUNICATING WITH READERS ON THE WEB
Merry Bruns, ScienceSites Communications
Are we reaching our readers with our Web sites? Can they read, scan, and understand our content? Do they feel we're talking directly to them, and understand their needs? The effectiveness of our web content in communicating with readers is dependent on how its presented, formatted, and edited for reading online. Web material needs to have a strong sense of audience focus and awareness, with language that can't be misunderstood, and organization that's clear. I'll discuss methods and we'll critique web sites to gain an understanding of what's involved in using the web as a communications medium.

BUILDING BRAND MEMBERSHIP ONLINE (882KB .ppt)
David Thiel
The best way to maintain customers - in our case, students, alumni, and employees - is to build their loyalty to a level where only see "our brand." That level of loyalty is called Brand Membership. While day-to-day experiences as a student or employee of a college are the most powerful at building lifetime loyalty, Brand Membership can also be built through online experiences. Leading institutions are building online experiences that give their target audiences the opportunity to gain greater loyalty to the brand. The right experiences - the ones the support the key beliefs of your brand - can build Brand Membership quickly, resulting in real financial and marketing value for the institution.

THE LUWAK: HOW CONTENT, DESIGN AND THE BACKEND
COME TOGETHER BY KEEPING THEM APART (2.5MB, 865KB, 410KB .ppt's)
Kevin W. Bishop and Arlen Johnson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Named for a Java-lovin', Java-livin' civet cat, the luwak is built in the J2EE architecture, runs with JBoss, stores its data in XML and performs server-side XSL transformations to deliver the requested HTML, PDF, XML, etc. Content providers use simple web forms to supply and edit content. Designers control the look and layout of the site with XSL and CSS sheets. Using Java servlets, application developers update the system without disturbing the work of the others. The speakers will present luwak clones both in production and under development.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE: WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, WEBBIE?
Stephen Jacobs, Rochester Institute of Technology
Crucial to the design of any website are the answers to the questions "who what where when how and why" of the site. Those can then lead you to understanding you information architecture, ie the way information is made available to people in your site design. Information architecture is the skeleton on which the rest of the site (writing, graphics, interface all hang) is assembled. This presentation will look at defining the site and creating the information architecture based on those definition. A sample site design will begin in this presentation and be carried through to the User Interface Design presentation that follows.

SQL AND YOU: A FRIENDLY INTRODUCTION TO DATABASES (249KB .ppt)
Kirk Anne, SUNY Geneseo
As many web developers have found, one of the biggest challenges is the manipulation of data. Databases are one way to manage the massive amount of data. No matter what language you present the data (Java, ASP, PHP, etc.), SQL is one standard way to extract the data from a database. In this presentation, we will go over a simple phone book example to illustrate basic database design concepts, SQL commands and how to put it on the web with PHP scripts.

THE USER INTERFACE: A VIRTUAL DIALOG IN THREE PARTS
Elouise Oyzon, Rochester Institute of Technology
Any website functions as a mediating force between participants in an implied dialog-- the user(s) with the the designer(s). Understanding that communication through an interface is a step removed from actual dialog, what can we do to optimize the process to make our message clear? How do we imbue the interface with a sense of personality? How do we make our presence felt? This presentation will make use of an information architecture example begun in the Information Architecture presentation that precedes it.

uPortal: ONE DOOR TO THE "PORTAL NIRVANA" (126KB .ppt)
Kirk Anne, SUNY Geneseo
uPortal is a freely available portal under development by higher education institutions. It is a collaborative, open-standard effort that uses Java, XML, JSP and J2EE. uPortal provides a framework for customizing web content based on identity and creating a community environment which allows each user to define a unique and personal view of campus information. This presentation will go through a "quick install" of uPortal and discuss some of the basic concepts needed to get a portal up and running. We will go through configuring a Tomcat server for uPortal, setting up channels for the portal, setting up groups and permissions and how to authenticate against an LDAP server.

EXPECTATIONS AND IDEAS: A DISCUSSION ABOUT ADMISSIONS WEB SITES (173KB .ppt)
Steven Lewis, SUNY Brockport
What do prospective students expect from higher education Web sites? What are other colleges and universities doing? How can you stay ahead of the curve? Steve moderates a panel discussion to address these issues as we wrap up the conference.