[36] in IS Home Pages
Comments on new IS home pages
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Naomi B. Schmidt)
Wed Apr 8 11:49:23 1998
To: is-home@MIT.EDU
Cc: acst@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 08 Apr 1998 11:48:54 EDT
From: "Naomi B. Schmidt" <nschmidt@MIT.EDU>
First of all, the new pages look really good overall. Here are
comments for improvements gathered from the Academic Computing
Support Team and Vijay:
1. Where you have links to various FAQ's, it would be useful to
also have a link (above the others) to a page that explains what
the various FAQ's cover. "Which FAQ do I want?" Also, the CWIS
FAQ should probably be renamed the Web Publishing FAQ, since
newcomers may have no idea what CWIS stands for. Another
suggestion is to have a Search engine for the FAQs
2. It seems that the section titled "Guides, Publications" just
blindly links to the Pubs catalogue. This is probably not the
right thing to do, as now many of our Guides are web-based and
don't have corresponding TPS paper copies or catalogue numbers.
The question is - Is this just a work in progress, or is it really
meant as a pointer to the TPS catalogue?
As far as Academic Computing is concerned, there are two
things that we'd like to see changed - eliminate the "Courseware"
links to the OLTA and NEOS documents, and under Software, link to
WhatRunsWhere (which the TPS folks agree should be the
definitive Web document re Athena software) - with link text
"Athena Software" rather than to the Summary of Supported Athena
Software, which TPS acknowledges is out of date. The URL of
WhatRunsWhere is web/acs/www/whereruns.html.
3. On the page "Contact Points in IS", link the teams listed in
the right hand column to the respective Team home pages (the way
the HelpDesk is linked at the moment.). Another suggestion is to
make the Team Leader's name live with a mailto link.
4. "Getting Help with Computers" should be changed to "Getting
Help with Computing". People felt quite strongly about this point
- it's not just the hardware, but also the process, the policies,
etc.
5. On the Training page, under Other, add another bullet:
* Education Technology (for Instructional Staff)
that links to the Faculty Liaison home page.
6. On the Products page, "Athena Software" should link to the
WhatRunsWhere page, not to the Summary of Available ... page.
7. On the Views page, add a link to the Electronic Teaching
Toolkit page (mit/faculty/ett/ )under the "For Faculty" section.
8. Also on the Views page, add the "Orientation to Computing at
MIT" link under the Faculty section as well as the Staff section.
There's a general feeling that this page (at least as far as
Faculty and Staff are concerned) is incomplete. There are other
(e.g. microcomputing and network) links that should be there.
9. On the Org page, should we have things listed there that
aren't links? Are all items intended to have an eventualy link?
10. Where does the Search engine search? Only under the web/is/
hierarchy? Our pages are all listed under web/acs, and so things
aren't being picked up. If you're only seaching the /is/
hierarchy, we'll need to make some modifications so that we get
picked up.
Keep up the good work!
Naomi
