9th Annual Webmaster Forum

Date and location: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at the Illini Union

Updated April 23, 2008

Now in its 9th year, the Annual Webmaster Forum has become something of a campus institution. We're not sure if that's good or bad, but soon we can all start saying that we've got 10 years of experience. Once again we've got a great keynote, a plethora of practical breakout sessions, the annual Cool Website Awards, and the proverbial free lunch.

• Forum registration and information times are 8:15 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. (Illini Rooms, West Entrance).
• Lunch and coffee breaks will be supplied.
• The University of Illinois Webmasters Forum is sponsored by CITES.

T-shirts! Get your t-shirts! If you would like to purchase a fashionable and functional Webmaster Forum t-shirt, reserve your size now with our Handy Order Form. Orders will be taken for a limited time -  until 5:00pm CST on Monday, April 21 - so order now! Styles for men and women are available. Payment by cash or check should be made when shirts are picked up at Forum registration.

In addition, we are liquidating our stock of Webmaster mugs and other merchandise. Everything must go! A limited number of Webmaster Mugs will be available for $6 each at Forum registration. You can reserve your mug on our t-shirt order form.

Schedule

Time	Illini Room A	Illini Room B	Illini Room C	Room 404, 4th floor
8:15-9:00	Registration (West Entrance) and Coffee
9:00-9:15 a.m.	Welcome (Sally Jackson, CIO for University of Illinois)
9:15-10:15 a.m.	Keynote address: Redesign Must Die ( Louis Rosenfeld LLC )
10:15-10:30 a.m.	Break
10:30 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.	CSS Redesign Tips (Doug Burgett)	Site Search Analytics: Conversations with your customers (Lou Rosenfeld)		SQL Tips and Tricks (Mike Wonderlich)
noon-1:15 p.m.			Lunch: Cool Web Awards Presentation
1:30-2:45 p.m.	Politics of Redesign (Cordelia Geiken)	Dreamweaver To Drupal: Moving to a Bigger Shell (John Barclay)		A Progress Report on Multimedia on the Illinois Web (Jack Brighton)
2:45-3:00 p.m.	Break
3:00-4:15 p.m.	Illlinois Senate Bill 511(Tim Offenstein & Hadi Rangin)	Illinois on iTunes U (Leslie Hammersmith & Ed Glaser)		Data Security (Ryan Eads)

Abstracts

Redesign Must Die

Keynote Speaker: Louis Rosenfeld

Louis Rosenfeld is founder of Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house focused on short, practical books on user experience design. As an information architecture consultant, he has helped numerous Fortune 500s and other large, messy, political enterprises make their information easier to find. Lou is co-author of "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" (O'Reilly & Associates; 3rd edition, 2006) and the forthcoming "Site Search Analytics: Conversations with your Customers" (Rosenfeld Media, 2008). Lou co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and UXnet, the User Experience Network. He blogs regularly at louisrosenfeld.com.

CSS Redesign Tips

Presenter: Doug Burgett

Breakout: Discover 10 tips for integrating the power of CSS into your next redesign. Tips include how to keep your code clean and accessible, gain flexibility with your layouts, organize your style sheets, and set your site up for an evolution process instead of another redesign project.

Site Search Analytics: Conversations with your customers

Presenter: Louis Rosenfeld

Breakout: Any site with a search engine captures users' search queries. This is real data that's plentiful and inexpensive to acquire, and not necessarily difficult to analyze. Site search analytics tells you what users really want from your site-in their own words-and how well you're meeting those needs. This session covers the basics of search analytics for web designers, showing how you can identify, diagnose, and fix major problems with your site's content, metadata, navigation, and search functions.

SQL Tips and Tricks

Presenter: Mike Wonderlich - Mike is the Technical Architect for the University of Illinois’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). In his role, he plans and manages the environment for the EDW and associated data marts. His team provides support for business intelligence users through a Business Objects Enterprise Server. They also assist many university offices connect directly to the EDW to supplement local systems and applications. In 2007over 8 million queries were executed in the data warehouse environment from almost 1600 different users.

Breakout: Structured Query Language (SQL) is very simple and very powerful. There are many features that are not very well understood. In this session we will explore how queries execute. Understanding how queries execute will enable us to write queries more efficiently.

Writing queries that execute quickly is not enough. In most situations, the more processing you can push to the database the more efficient your applications will run. We will also explore some ways to get more than just rows of data from our queries. SQL can be used to perform advanced filtering and execute analytical functions. As many different databases are in use, we will review the similarities and differences between SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle.

Cool Web Awards Presentation

This year's best of show in the University's webworld.

Politics of Redesign

Presenter: Cordelia Geiken - Cordelia has over ten years of experience with web design and implementation. From 1996 to 1999 she served as the first Webmaster at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and got to witness the growing pains of the graphical web browser first hand.

She then spent a year as a Senior Instructional Designer working with a team of specialists to produce interactive distance-learning courseware for delivery over the WWW and via CD-ROM. Since then, she has returned to the University of Illinois, working first for the College of ACES and now for CITES Educational Technologies. Over the course of her career Cordelia has experienced firsthand the joys and tribulations of redesigning existing websites.

Breakout: - The more things change, the more they stay the same. Acknowledging that politics play an important part in any design process should be a given, however, it is often ignored. Understanding early on what some of the political issues are in redesigning a website will help to keep them from becoming overwhelming and bogging you down. How to recognize these issues and deal with them effectively can mean the difference between misery and success.

Political issues that often arise include:

• Past Ownership – someone else used to be responsible for the site and now they work for/with you
• Vision – a stakeholder has a vision for what the site should be, but that vision isn’t clearly stated
• Personal Taste – a stakeholder doesn’t like a certain color, font, layout, etc.
• Organizational Policy or Structure – precedents and requirements have been set by an organization above you

This session will present some strategies to help constructively deal with these issues and more. There will also be time for discussion, questions and answers.

A Progress Report on Multimedia on the Illinois Web

Presenters: Craig Jackson, Director, Applied Technologies for Learning in the Arts & Sciences
Drew MacGregor, Coordinator of Educational & Multimedia Technologies Department of Computer Science
Jack Brighton, Director of Internet Development, WILL Public Media
Angella Anderson, Disability Specialist, Supervisor of Text Conversion Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services

Breakout: A growing number of campus departments are producing streaming and downloadable media, and web multimedia has become mission-critical for higher education in general. But how do we make online media accessible, findable, and useable? Members of the Illinois Multimedia Users Group (patterned on the Campus Webmasters) are developing solutions for publishing media in a way that allows sharing of content across the campus web, while managing media assets in our (ahem) customary decentralized manner. This session will also cover what you need to know about metadata and its role in making digital media live and breathe on the emerging semantic web. In addition, Angella Anderson, Disability Specialist, Supervisor of Text Conversion Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services, will discuss issues in making multimedia content more accessible to people with various perceptual impairments.

Dreamweaver To Drupal: Moving to a Bigger Shell

Presenter: John Barclay

Breakout: Local Drupal developers demonstrate the inventory, planning and implementation of migrating a site into a Content Management. Drupal and the UIUC Webmasters Forum site (http://www.webmasters.uiuc.edu/ ) will be used as a context. Basic Drupal functionality will be demonstrated by walking through a handful of content types and looking at the theming engine. Participants should walk away with a generalized approach to site conversion, a good look at Drupal, and bunch of URLs.

Illlinois Senate Bill 511 – IITAA

Presenters: Tim Offenstein & Hadi Rangin

Breakout: In recent months the Illinois Legislation has passed the Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act. This Act impacts how we create and redesign our web sites. This breakout will give you a brief run down of what’s behind IITAA and what the campus is doing about it. The majority of the breakout will be a demonstration by Hadi Rangin, showing us what roadblocks and obstacles a blind person must overcome in order to use a web site. Hadi’s demo will help you see what he sees.

Illinois on iTunes U

Presenters: Leslie Hammersmith and Ed Glaser

Breakout: iTunes U is a free, hosted service from Apple that allows colleges and universities to deliver educational multimedia content and podcasts via the iTunes Store. We'll talk about how we're implementing iTunes U here at Illinois and how it works. We're currently working with Public Affairs, the Business and Education colleges, and others to make their content available.

Data Security

Presenter: Ryan Eads

Breakout: This presentation will discuss design principles to help segregate risk and reduce the number of threat vectors. Points of consideration for maintaining the desired level of security during an application's lifecycle will be offered. The presenter will also discuss and demonstrate tools that can be used to assess the relative level of security for an application. The presenter would like to conclude with a conversation regarding resources that should be provided to assist Webmasters with establishing and maintaining secure applications on campus.