Webmasters - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thank you to all who attended our 10th Annual Webmaster Forum!

The 10th Annual Forum kept up the tradition of memorable Webmaster Forums. We were fortunate, yet again, to have a really great keynote speaker with Luke Wroblewski. The breakouts were also excellent and well attended. The word is spreading, we had attendees this year from as far away as Michigan. This was also a year for firsts. For the first time we honored an individual, Amy Young, for her outstanding contributions to the webmaster community. Thank you Amy! Also for the first time, all the nominated web sites were honored for their efforts and accomplishments. We want to make sure each and every effort to produce top-notch web sites is recognized. Out of the best of the best, we selected four outstanding sites:

• ACDIS – Clean, sophisticated design...appropriate for the target audience; nice use of real-estate on the homepage; ‘print, email, and share’ buttons allow for easy transformation of articles; well-organized content and a dynamic menu system allows for easy navigation through the site; vast improvement over previous design.
• Chancellor’s Office – Attractive, elegant design has an excellent visual tie with the main campus site; good use of blue; well-organized content and nice photography.
• FAE – One of the most useful applications for the web community as a whole; clean, intuitive user interface; improved from earlier versions; only tool that evaluates based on the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA).
• ATLAS – Great navigation menu simplifies multiple sections into 3 buttons; excellent writing allows for non-technical visitors to understand the technical content throughout the site; attractive, well-designed layouts put content first so users get a ‘service-oriented’ experience; FAE/code compliant; bonus accessibility features such as a low vision preference are excellent touches.

Our thanks to all who joined in by nominating their favorite site, even if it was an ATLAS web page. :-)

Video and pictures!

Thanks to the I-Teach Communities group, we have another first for the Forum: a web cast of the keynote speech (WMV file).

And just to prove it was a great event, we even have pictures! (Another first!).

New Design for Web Services Free ‘WebTools’

Web Services is marking its 4th anniversity of the Web Services Toolbox from Public Affairs. In celebration we are beginning the rollout of our new design. Phase 1, which is complete, is releasing a new Toolbox homepage and framework for all other pages. Phase 2 will consist of redesigning each of the tools for the new layout. One by one the tools will be released as they are complete.

Check out the new design at Web Services home page.. (AD authentication required.)