The Next Big Thing
One day, not so very long ago, Ieuan walked into our weekly staff meeting and cheerfully said “Let’s re-skin CUinfo!”
Will’s jaw went a little slack. Diane’s expression grew pained. And me…I just laughed out-loud.
Truth of it is, CUinfo has been on our to-do list since the earliest days of Thomas Richardson’s tenure. His eyes used to get all sparkly when he talked about “fixing CUInfo” and he always said it with these really board hand gestures to accompany the phrase. I frequently laughed at him, too.
But the joke, apparently, is on yours truly.
We are about to embark upon a plan to (ultimately) bring CUinfo under the cornell.edu umbrella and the first step is the re-skinning project.
Yes, really. We’re going to re-skin it.
Would you like a moment to angst about this? Because I could leave you alone and go get a bagel or something.
Seriously, though, we do recognize that this has a potentially huge impact on the Cornell community and we do want to give you a chance to voice your opinions. As the project progresses, you can expect screen shots and posts that resemble the ones from the summer of 2004 when we were re-designing cornell.edu.
Right now, we’re still in the very early stages. This re-skin will literally be just that. All of the information on CUinfo will remain intact and will be presented in a design that is as close to the current one as bringing it into the cornell.edu design family will allow.
Please feel free to share your thoughts, comments and questions. All are welcome.
Remember, change is good,
Lisa
“…His eyes used to get all sparkly when he talked about “fixing CUInfo” and he always said it with these really board hand gestures to accompany the phrase…”
Yeah, Lisa, the first time I actually said that was the day I met Steve Worona. Before I actually knew what Steve Worona did. No one was laughing that day.
TR
Hurray!! It’s well due for a redesign… since right now it’s just a mess of loosly sorted lists.
It is nice to see the continual improvements in Cornell websites. I would like to mention two points -
#1
There are times (not unoften) when “cuinfo” is unavailable on the web.
It would be nicer to find an easy link about the “network status” 24/7 in the website http://www.cornell.edu , instead of being linked only to “cuinfo”.
Right now – the “network status” is available through a link http://noclog.cit.cornell.edu/open-cgi/states – which is available only through “cuinfo”. If “cuinfo” itself is down – How do we know about “Network Status” ??
It is important because a lot of us needs to access the “cuinfo” and “cornell email” from off-campus, and often from distant places – within US, or outside. Knowing whether the “cuinfo” and/or email is working or net saves a lot of time and effort.
# 2
Even when the “network status” is available on the net – it does not always reflect the true status. More so in the very early hours (11pm to 6am EST).
The network status should reflect the status correctly all times.
While the local(Ithaca) users might not need it much at those wee hours, those of us who are away in International Seminars/Conferences/Off-campus work – are in a different timezone. Many of them still may need to know about the “network status”, for whom calling 255 9900 may not be an easy/possible option.
Thanks
Personally its nice to see a face lift, however I believe there is a lot of wasted space on the new page especially with pictures. This is really more of an Intranet site that people go to quickly find information and links and so doesn’t need the fluff. I would like to see it condensed as much as possible to avoid having to scroll on the page (if at all possible).
It would also be really nice if there was a quick way to search the available links on the page to find what you are looking for. The FireFox browser has this as a feature and you might also want to look at using AJAX [http://script.aculo.us/demos/ajax/autocompleter] to create text box within the page that allows auto completion linking to a database index of the links on this page. This would allow pages to be looked up by multiple names just like a library catalog.
It completely agree with the previous author. To you is above what to work…