Sea Grant Week 2003
(Notes by co-chairs Pat Kight and Dave Brenner)
Four of the five Sea Grant regions have adopted the regional page design created by Dave Brenner with feedback from the Webmasters' group. The Pacific Region will do so within the month, giving us a unified "look and feel" at the regional level. It's unclear how these pages will fit into the proposed new National Office site redesign.
Followup: The "Sea Grant Programs" page maintained by the National Office is out of date and includes a number of nonfunctioning links; Amy Painter has been notified and will see it gets fixed.
While we haven't formally resurveyed programs, it appears from the reports given by those present that most Sea Grant programs have incorporated, or are about to incorporate, accessibility features into their sites. Redesign is a good opportunity to add those features; once they are in place, they are fairly easy to maintain. There was some discussion of multimedia (audio, video) accessibility, and workarounds for achieving that. Providing a link to a text transcript makes the a-v content available to everyone who can't access the originals, either because of disability or slow Internet connections.
Followup: The new NOAA Web guidelines emphasize accessibility.
Volunteers were solicited to take a look at the existing guideline documents, which date back to 1995, and consider updates. The committee will solicit suggestions from the Web group and have a draft revision ready to circulate to webmasters and communicators in advance of the mid-cycle Communicators meeting in spring 2004.
Committee members are:
The group discussed the tip sheet put together by Patty Snow and suggested minor revisions. The revised sheet will be circulated to Webmasters and Communicators as an aid in the decision-making process when requests are received for Web publication.
Followup: The tip sheet has been forwarded to the Communicators' mailing list; the Webmasters can find it via this site.
Non-standard uses of the Sea Grant logo are beginning to turn up on Web sites, in publications and in presentations. After some discussion of the importance of maintaining a consistent graphic identity across the network, the group agreed to ask the communicators to appoint a new "logo cop" to fill the void left when Leigh Handell left the network. Carol Kaynor of Alaska Sea Grant will continue to maintain the supply of approved logos and provide them to programs on request. [Followup:
We discussed what we knew at that point about the impending National Office Web site and the consultants who are developing it. Some concern was expressed that, beyond a few early phone calls to select members of the Web group, we had no idea what to expect or whether our feedback was welcomed or considered. The group asked Pat to convey that concern to the Communicators in her Saturday morning report.
Followup: Contractors Lakshmi Narayan and Dan Bockman (The Big Picture) subsequently unveiled a prototype of the proposed National Office site during the Monday lunch. In a session later that afternoon they explained that the prototype is a proof of concept, not a finished product, and invited feedback from communicators and Web developers.
During Lakshmi and Dan's afternoon presentation, several communicators expressed concern that the consultants had not yet spoken with members of the Sea Grant network outside the national office/NOAA, and that their assessments of our audiences and their relative importance may be skewed toward the Beltway perspective as a result. The consultants are preparing a proposal to do further marketing and message/audience identification work for the national office, and agreed to seek feedback from the programs as part of that process if they are funded.
It is not yet clear when the new Web site might go on line, or how it will interact with existing sites (the regional pages, program sites, etc.) Stay tuned ...