About this Website

Accessibility Features:

• Try adjusting the overall document font sizes using your browser's Edit or View menu. All page elements, including banner/navigational, should scale accordingly.
• Try resizing your browser window to make it narrow or wide. The content should reflow to produce a reasonable page. (Microsoft Internet Explorer has issues when the window becomes too narrow. Unfortunately, their support for current web standards is not so good. A modern standards-compliant browser like Opera, Mozilla, or Netscape will show better results.)
• In older browsers or non-visual browsers, additional elements appear to guide one through the page. (More precisely: in modern CSS-aware browsers, those additional elements are unnecessary and thus are hidden.) In particular, the website should be usable in a text-only browser such as lynx. (Try it: from a Unix command prompt, issue the command lynx http://math.arizona.edu/.)
• There is no reliance on Java, JavaScript, or cookies. The pages should work in any browser.
• Images are used only to make pages more pleasant. There is no reliance on images for navigational purposes. In particular, the user can disable image loading and still use the site.
• Bandwidth requirement is low. Overall content (including linked resources like images and style sheets) on most pages is under 15K. Some of that gets cached. Thus, most pages should load in under 2 seconds over a dialup connection.

Navigational Features:

• The Search box is available on all pages in the upper right-hand corner. (Search results are provided by Google.)
• The upper left-hand corner has a "crumbs trail" (think Hansel & Gretel) to help you identify your location in our tree.
• You can jump to any major subtree from any page using the links in the banner.
• While in the pages of a major subtree, the subtree outline appears on the left side.

Other Features:

• Overall look and feel should be consistent across pages. This aspect is centrally controlled; thus, it will be easy to maintain that consistency over time.
• Try Print Preview on various pages. Many navigational elements should disappear, and links to external sites should have the URLs printed after the links (requires modern standards-compliant browser). In short, the printout should be useful as a printout, as opposed to merely being an exact duplicate of what you see on the screen.
• Pages are coded to current XHTML+XML and CSS standards. Links at the bottom of each page make it easy to check for coding errors. (Note, however, that the W3C validators are out-of-date and will sometimes flag legal constructs as errors.)

Features for Local Users:

• The Resources homepage (reachable from anywhere on the site in one click) contains the majority of deep-linked bookmarks needed regularly by our local users.
• For example, the MathSciNet Search link does not go to the MathSciNet homepage; instead, it goes to the Full Search page. Similarly, many of the other links go directly to the page of interest.
• To have 1-click or even 0-click access to the Resources page, local users may want to set their browser start page either to http://math.arizona.edu/ or http://math.arizona.edu/resources/.
• One-click access to Google search: from any math page, click the "Go" button in the upper right-hand corner (without putting in any search terms). You'll get a search form for searching the entire web using Google. Try it!

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Future Work:

Much work remains. Many sections do not yet have their information architecture worked out, nor is all content online. A database-driven Events calendar is under discussion.

Once the major content components are up, we intend to study the overall organization: can people find what they seek? Different users may have different experiences in this regard, so our study will include a variety of subjects. This will lead to various reorganizations.

Finally, the overall graphic design, also called look and feel, must be improved upon. This may require bringing in a professional design firm.

Some of the past and ongoing discussions are being archived at intranet.math.arizona.edu/~www-main-2003/.

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Implementation notes

This website is coded mostly in XHTML with CSS. We use PHP for a small amount of management: including standard header/footer material, and generating data-driven content on certain pages, such as in the People section.

We tried to set it up so that the server-side source for most pages is trivially easy to read/edit. It reminds us of how simple HTML was back in the days of HTML 1.0. The idea is that our markup should be so simple, anyone can edit it.

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At the top, most pages start with something along the following lines:

<?php
// Every page must set some variables and suck in the topmatter:
$title = "About this Website";
$short_title = "Website";
$sectiontree_marker = "resources.website";
//
include("dirvars");
include("$dotsToSectionHome/rsrc/inc_top");
?>

<p>
This website is coded mostly in XHTML...

and they end with:

<?php include("$dotsToSectionHome/rsrc/inc_bottom"); ?>

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Our CSS code makes it easy to have a few standard types of highlighted elements:

<div class="centerbox">
A centered box with left-aligned text.
</div>

<div class="centerbox center larger">
A centered box with centered text that has been made larger.
</div>

<div class="sidebox">
A side box floating to the right, with no width limitation.
</div>

<div class="sidebox wide">
<div>Title</div>
<p>Same thing, but with a title, and forced to not take up as much width.</p>
</div>

<div class="sidebox narrow">
<div>Title</div>
<p>Same thing, but even narrower.</p>
</div>