[tei-council] Glines index page

[David Sewell]

One of the recommendations that came out of the Board's discussion of 
the website earlier this month was for some formal usability studies to 
be undertaken prior to any requests (to the TEI community and/or 
third-party vendors) for proposals to contract for website migration. 
I'm sure that any such studies would report that the status quo is not 
optimal, from a user-friendliness point of view, and improved navigation 
would be a sine qua non of any website redesign.

I wasn't part of the previous website design committee, but it's pretty 
clear that the site navigation is confronting two competing needs: (1) 
to provide an upfront overview of what the "TEI Guidelines" are in 
general, and (2) provide ready access to the Guidelines themselves.

Need #1 is met by two pages within the OpenCMS framework:

1.1 Overview of "TEI Guidelines" (http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/)
1.2 Overview of "P5 Guidelines" (http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/)

Need #2, qua P5, is met by two pages generated by the source release, as 
noted by Martin:

2.1 a P5 general info page 
(http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html)
2.2 the formal P5 Guidlines Table of Contents 
(http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index-toc.html)

So the reasoning behind it all is clear, even if the implementation is 
clunky.

It occurs to me that an interim fix might be to add, immediately below 
the page headers for 1.1 and 1.2, a prominent link saying something like 
"Go to the TEI P5 Guidelines Table of Contents", to help people who 
assume that is what "the Guidelines" means.

David

On Fri, 23 Nov 2012, Martin Holmes wrote:

> I don't want to start a fight, or re-start an old one, or open old
> wounds. But I do want to say: I think what we have now is not... well,
> _optimal_. Am I the only one that feels this way? If so, of course I'll
> slink away to my burrow and never mention it again.
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
> On 12-11-23 01:59 PM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>> Yes, there was a design committee and Julia was on it. Much, very much,
>> blood was spilt as far as i recall, though not necessarily for that reason.
>>
>> Is it worth tinkering with this particular aspect, which has been like
>> this ever since the web site came into being in its present incarnation?
>> If/when the website moves from its current host we will have much more
>> significant changes to put in place.
>>
>>
>> On 23/11/12 21:32, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>>> I believe there was a design cttee and that Julia f was involved. But I may be be misrembering
>>> (Or "miser bearing" as the spell thing would have it)
>>>
>>> Carved in stone on my iPad
>>>
>>> On 23 Nov 2012, at 21:01, "Martin Holmes" <mholmes at uvic.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 12-11-23 12:06 PM, Lou Burnard wrote:
>>>>> It's the way it is because someone (can't remember who now) wanted a
>>>>> simpler front page, when they saw the full index_toc
>>>> I can't find any discussion of this in the archives, although my search
>>>> may have missed it. But with its rather odd "Some Popular Sections" bit,
>>>> the index.html is hardly smaller than the index_toc.html. I vote for a
>>>> single front/TOC page at index.html, with a 301 at the old _toc location.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Martin
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On 23/11/12 17:22, Martin Holmes wrote:
>>>>>> Here's something that's always puzzled me. This page:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <http://teijenkins.hcmc.uvic.ca/job/TEIP5/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index.html>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> is a sort of half-a-table-of-contents, and I don't really see the point
>>>>>> of it. Much of what's there is also on the real table of contents:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <http://teijenkins.hcmc.uvic.ca/job/TEIP5/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/index-toc.html>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> but not all of it, so half the time it gets in the way. I noticed a
>>>>>> couple of people at the workshop last week a bit confused by it too.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Does anyone else think it would be a good idea to merge index and
>>>>>> index_toc into a single front page?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>> Martin
>>>> --
>>>> Martin Holmes
>>>> University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
>>>> (mholmes at uvic.ca)
>>>> --
>>>> tei-council mailing list
>>>> tei-council at lists.village.Virginia.EDU
>>>> http://lists.village.Virginia.EDU/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
>>>>
>>>> PLEASE NOTE: postings to this list are publicly archived
>>
>

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400314, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4314 USA
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/