Home, home on the page

LIZZIE ALLEN AND MARC BUSH/YH

This summer, a new home page suddenly appeared at www.yale.edu, and, in keeping with good bridal tradition, Yale's latest web betrothal is at once something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

What's new and blue is pretty clear-the site now features more extensive graphics, interactive menus that pop up appropriate pages, and dynamic announcements. University Printer and project director John Gambell's name for the project says it all: "the blue site." On the surface, this name refers to the bright blue background of the new index and menu pages, but, according to Gamble, it also highlights a deeper effort to reflect Yale's spirit and vitality. "I think that my goal was to create a site which would distinguish Yale, and when I say distinguish, I mean to create a distinction between what you see in general among the peer institutions and what Yale has produced. At the same time, what we produced needed to be, it seemed to me, absolutely functional," Gambell said.

Ryan Barrows, MC '01, is happy about what he sees. "I really like the new layout-I think that it makes navigating the site much easier, for both students and outsiders to the University. The page can take slightly longer to load, but because so many more options and links are available from the main page, it still makes it faster to find what you are looking for," he said. "I thought that the old site was very plain and old-fashioned looking for a major university's homepage, and the new one looks much more professional and presents Yale to visitors in a much better light."

In keeping with his stated goals, Gambell focused on external users, and especially potential Yale applicants. Although the possibility of developing a completely separate intranet for users within Yale which would provide easy access to what they use most remains "an ongoing issue," according to Gambell, he would rather see one good, multipurpose site. He said, "The blue site is a whole separate entity and it was designed to provide a whole different experience for people approaching Yale's web from outside Yale ... the key aspect was this kind of front door." But he adds, "I think it would be a better idea if we could develop a site which was functional for both internal and external users."

At the same time, he thinks a big part of the formula is accessing Yale pages from alternate entry points, such as departmental web pages, which can provide tailored guides to relevant content on yale.edu. "Many people will create their own interfaces to Yale's web," Gambell said. "I think this is a really essential project." Tailored interfaces could include projects along the lines of the Herald's own Ground Zero.

Gambell says that response to the new page has been quite positive, with most of the negative feedback being about technical glitches, which have been mostly resolved. "We're more or less clean across the board," he said. He added that most of the other negative responses have fallen into two categories: people with a "tremendous love of the old books or a strong interface with Yaleinfo" and people unhappy "about the whole approach to the site." The latter seem to want something more along the lines of Yahoo!, but Gambell explains that, though they experimented with such an approach, "It felt like Yahoo; it didn't feel like Yale."

Sarah Merriman, PC '02, didn't even know that the Yale front page had changed. "I don't go there-it's worthless," she said. "I go straight to Yaleinfo."

Fortunately, the "something old" includes not just an archived version of the old books pages, but Yaleinfo, a popular internal portal for students, and all of the other old informational pages. Gambell explains that apart from sentimental value, many people felt more comfortable finding things the old way, and though a process of conversion of some of these pages is underway, there is no feeling of urgency. Many of the Yaleinfo pages are the end result of clicking through the blue site's menus.

"We were determined that this blue idea not be transmitted as such to all of the other Yale web sites. In fact, I think it would be mistake to do that. Then the blue site acts as a kind of finding device, a background against which the other pages are viewed," Gambell said. But he admits, "It's not clear whether Yaleinfo, as a kind of graphical device, will be maintained over time."

An example of what a page brought into the fold might look like is the Forestry site. The same general look and feel has been adapted to reflect Yale yet maintain diversity.

Antoine McNamara, MC '01, complains about the discontinuity. "In my limited experience with the new design, I've found it disappointing. It seems like a shoddy front-end that doesn't actually change the underworkings of the site. It might work if the whole site were to follow in it's footsteps, but now there is a confusing gap between the new interface and all the old pages," he said.

But getting to this point was no easy task. A committee of decision-makers across the University formed by the Secretary's office decided that the web site needed attention. Although this committee no longer exists, the organization of the site was approved by the offices of the Secretary and President, and feedback has been solicited from the officers of the University.

However, the ad hoc process that allowed the new web page to be created does not really seem tenable for the long term. "My sense is that we do need to establish a web advisory committee," Gambell said. "The whole issue of the administration of it is quite interesting." Seeing the site as something akin to a magazine, with the various sections, each with its own content, he suggests a group of "editors" should be formed to overlook the pages.

Finding a structure will be difficult, though, since there is an infinite number of possibilities for the site, and, at the same time, various parts of the Yale world need to have input. "It's a big, big, big task, and a big administrative challenge," Gambell admitted.

There is also the need for coordination with the webmasters for the remainder of the site, Leon Marr and Molly Simpson. "All of the requests to webmaster are forwarded to me and several other people at ITS. I coordinate issues which have to do with the blue site, but Leon and Molly are both absolutely in the loop at every point, and we will often go back and forth as to 'is this something we should do or you should do?'" Gambell said.

The actual design was also a cooperative effort, the work of a team assembled by Gambell, including Michael Rock at the graphic design firm 2x4, Inc, John Corum '95 at 13pt web design, and freelance writer/editor Catherine Iinow, formerly the director of public affairs at the Yale Law School. Photographs were largely from Steve Dunwell '69, though some were from Michael Marsland and Richard Benson.

"At each junction, there were several proposals and several variations of the proposals worked through with the design team and [Secretary] Linda Lorimer's, LAW '77, office," Gambell said.

As for the "something borrowed," that, too, is a lesson in the creative process. This summer, the webmaster team was informed that the JavaScript that allows the text to rotate in the announcement box had been drawn extensively from webreference.com.

A series of meetings involving Corum, who had written the JavaScript, decided that while the script had morphed quite a bit from the original to be functional on the blue site, some credit was still due. Gambell said, "What we did is we went to John Corum, who had built the site, and kind of tried to figure out what the issue might be here. And John immediately said, 'Well, yes, that comes from that particular reference.'"

The problem was that since the appropriate copyright credit seemed to demand that the script remain intact, there was no clear indication of what to do. "We went back and forth on it," Gambell said. "It did make us kind of scramble around." The end result was a copyright notice in the page source (visible only in Internet Explorer) that explains:
Front door headline ticker inspired and adapted from Mecklermedia, Inc. and webreference.com's "Dynamic Headline Fader" tutorial. For complete source code and copyright, see http://webreference.com/dhtml/column13/

"I think it's worth saying that our intention is to be absolutely above board and proper about this stuff, and we would hope that people using our code would contact us about it," Gambell explained. "All of us are extremely indebted to the people who have created immense amounts of code that we all use in one way or another in this way of building web pages."

Bob Dunne, who teaches the Computer and the Law course, felt that this was the right course of action. "The web team handled this situation perfectly. There is no doubt that creative coding is intellectual property, although the form of protection it gets can vary. There is always an issue of whether, or the extent to which, making intellectual property available on the Net implies a license for others to use it freely," he said. "If you know who created the intellectual property you want to use or build on, ask for permission and give credit as necessary."

This incident highlights the difficulties of attribution in this new field, issues that are particularly important at a place that puts such emphasis on academic honesty as Yale. "It's really difficult to pin down when something is proprietary and something is not," Gambell said. "I feel that it raises the issue of to what extent and in what ways is coding intellectual property, and I know a lot of work is being done on this. In any event, I think we should be setting a standard for this kind of work."

Darren Mahone, PC '02, has mixed sentiments about the project overall. "I like the Yale blue," he said. "But you have to hunt around more, which is inconvenient if you're in a hurry."

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