Web Administration, Design, and Development

The challenge of web accessibility raises issues of both policy and technology. Join experts in each of these two areas in this free April 4 EDUCAUSE Live! web seminar, The Why and How of Web Accessibility, as presenters Harry Hochheiser, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences, Towson University, and Tracy Mitrano, Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy and Law Program, Cornell University, discuss this important topic.

Policy guru Tracy Mitrano says: "Developing a web accessibility policy has been one of the greatest but most rewarding challenges I have faced in creating an IT policy framework at Cornell. With the EDUCAUSE Live! audience, I would like to share some of the struggles and stories about that process and what accessibility, education, and the web have come to mean to me as a result."

Today I'm attending Adaptive Path's UX Week in Washington DC.  Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs gave an interesting presentation on storytelling.  The comment I enjoyed most was about silence being the "space of creativity".  Brooks encouraged listeners to accept silence and to let creativity spark and unfold without trying to change it's course by influencing the silence. 

When I was in college, we spent one session of my foundation design class talking exploring the concept of negative space -- this is the visual equivalent of silence.  And I think it's a concept that technologists and web designers often forget.  So often we get caught up in maximizing the available real estate (a web page or the ten minutes we have to present to a committee) to deliver a story that we ignore the incredible value of silence.  By building applications that use more negative spaces (silence) we could really improve our user experience -- because we would be giving them a space to create and collaborate with us to develop the story.

I am attending EduWeb 2007 this week.  This is a conference focused on web technology in Higher Ed -- with a slight tilt toward marketing and recruitment.

At the heart of our MICA Connected strategy we are trying to bridge the gap between marketing/communications/public web  experience and systems/services/private content.  Many of the discussions and presentations at EduWeb offer great examples of how broad the web experience can (should?) be.  In his keynote address, Bob Johnson said "message control is dead" -- yet so many campuses are afraid of letting more people participate in shaping the college's web experience.  So many people I've talked with this week really believe that the best ambassadors for our institutions are our students and faculty.  We believe that our web presence would be richer, more exciting and a more true reflection of our campus experience if we tapped into the authentic resources of our own community.

As I start to bounce some ideas around about how administrative systems (student systems, financial systems, etc.) are integrated into web redesign schemata for a conference paper due . . . soon (!), I am starting to see a trend.  I currently sit on a committee that is reviewing web redesign proposals and this question of administrative integration has come up in each proposal.

I am struck by how many web vendors define "integration" very differently than I do.  It would seem that web designers (and this was confirmed during a very good conference I attended last summer) are very concerned with making a site sticky and functional (both very good things) but maybe not as concerned with some of the less sticky but no less important tasks that users perform (e.g. generating a purchase order -- not fun).  My argument is that integration is not a series of touch points that port users to different places, but, rather, a true blending of the web experience and the (admittedly dull) tasks that administrative users perform.

The EDUCAUSE Web Professionals Constituent Group (formerly the Web Administrators Constituent Group) welcomes Melissa Meehan, Director of Web Administration at Buffalo State College. She has joined Sara Clark, Director of Web Services, Missouri State University, as group coleader. The group is refocusing on use of the Web as both an institutional productivity and a public relations tool. It supports the professional development of project managers, administrators, developers, designers, and other Web professionals.
Subscribe to or search the archives of the group's listserv.

Of course there's no such thing as too secure - at least not in my mind. But I did run into an interesting happening with Firefox this morning that I thought I'd share. As I researched the problem, I noticed that there was very little documentation about it on the Web, so I'll add to that a bit. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

A user was registering for the 2005 EDUCAUSE/Dartmouth PKI Deployment Summit (with Firefox, of course). He was not logged in to the site, so when he clicked "Register online using our secure server", he was presented with a login screen. The login page was, obviously, https. However, when he entered his information and clicked the "Log In" button, he got a popup that read as follows:
Although this page is encrypted, the information you have entered is to
be sent over an unencrypted connection and could easily be read by a
third party.
Wow, that's not cool! EDUCAUSE is very concerned about security - jumping out of a secure connection is a rookie mistake that I just wouldn't make!

First stop was the code. Nothing unusual there, all of my URLs were relative, so we couldn't have been losing https along the way... So off to Google. After a bit of looking, I found one suggestion that hit the nail on the head. The way the login is implemented, the login form submits to a javascript. The javascript does some setting of form variables and such depending on the page you're logging in from, then submits the login form. It turns out that Firefox, because it doesn't know exactly what the javascript is going to do on the client side, has to assume that the javascript is submitting the form data to an unencrypted page. Even though that wasn't the case here, that's where the popup message was coming from. So it was an easy fix - change the form action to the actual destination, and move the call to the javascript function to the onsubmit action of the form. Sure enough, problem solved.

I think this illustrates one of the great features of Firefox, though. Sure, as a developer, I'm annoyed that they don't interpret the javascript first and popup a message only in the case that it's necessary. However, as a regular internet user, I'm so happy that there's a browser option out there that takes security this seriously. It won't surprise anyone reading this to hear that Internet Explorer didn't question the security of that process at all. Score one more for Firefox.

In this podcast, Daniel provides some information on the session he led at CUMREC 2005 about Conversion to Web Standards: Tips, Tricks, and Methods. (Running Time: 5:00)

In this podcast, we'll hear from Thomas Tuchscher as he gives us a feel for his CUMREC 2005 presentation about outsourcing web design ... in some ways much of what was discussed here is very applicable to any large, change management initiative. (Running Time: 7:19)