New look for the CITS website

Hopefully you noticed the new look of the CITS web site last quarter. This newer design is one step along the way toward a larger redesign of our web presence. The revisions to the site include a much expanded video archive, hosted through blip.tv (profiled in our last newsletter). The front page also has limited RSS capabilities so that changes on our main page can be pushed to your favorite RSS reader. And, classes relevant to the Technology and Society emphasis are now listed on the front page as well.

These changes were reactions to the major user comments we received: users told us they wanted to be able to browse our videos more easily and access them more reliably; users told us they wanted to know when our web site had changes, which we have incorporated into the frontpage for now; and students told us they wanted to see available Technology and Society classes without following a lot of links. We are proud of the changes we have made to address these requests, but we want to go much farther.

Our current plans include moving to a Drupal-based web site, which should build a solid web infrastructure for our current web site revision and many future revisions. Along with this back-end transition, we are expecting lots of front-end changes that should vastly improve our web presence. Our major goal in this revision is simple: We want our new web site to embody our Center.

While the goal is simple, accomplishing it isn’t as easy. There are so many great things about the Center to feature and so many ways people like to interact with the Center, that realizing this goal is taking a lot of thoughtful planning. For instance, it is important to us that the web site be part of our Center’s practice, not something that “reflects” the Center. This means that a new web site has to let people engage in what we do as a Center and use the tools we study. Using Drupal’s systems of roles, some registered users will be able to use protected web spaces to make notes on their in-progress projects and also connect their project and interests to faculty and graduate students who share similar concerns. Expanded social bookmarking options will be available. The human-side of our Center, and our research, will be more visible—literally. You can expect to see lots of pictures of people who work with Center, lots of video so you can see us showcase our work, podcasts in case listening on the move is better for you, and shorter videos that showcase specific faculty members, graduate students, and projects.

But, these changes are just the start. In the next few issues of the newsletter, I will talk about larger issues at play in our design: How do we showcase the distinctive characteristics of CITS? How do we live our Center’s values of interdisciplinarity, connecting across boundaries, and exemplary research and teaching through a new presence? I hope if you have any thoughts along the way, you will let me know at earl@cits.ucsb.edu.