October 2007

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October 24, 2007

2nd Annual Bad Designs on Campus Contest

The contest is open:

Have you ever run into a campus door because you pushed it on the wrong side? Couldn’t figure out how to control the lights in a lecture room? Been frustrated with the online interface for Wolverine Access or other university websites? Here’s your chance to vent your frustrations with bad designs that you have to deal with on campus, and potentially win a prize!

Posted by hampelm at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

Investing in Ability week

Investing in Ability week at Michigan is October 19-26. Of particular interest to web professionals may be:

Monday, October 22:

UMHS Disability Challenge
Time: 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
Description: Experience simulations to help you understand disability issues, and see innovative tools and devices to overcome barriers.
Location: University Hospital 2nd floor Triangle

Wednesday, October 24:

People with Disabilities and their Daily Lives
Time: 11 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Description: Carolyn Grawi from the Ann Arbor Center for Independent Living speaks on the issues and barriers that people with disabilities face daily.
Location: Biomedical Science Research Building Auditorium (109 Zina Pitcher Place, corner of Huron and Washtenaw)

Daily:

Adaptive Technology Computing Site Open House
Time: 2 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Description: Learn about and use screen magnifiers, screen readers, scanner-readers, speech recognition, ergonomic seating, motorized adjustable height work stations, track balls and more.
Location: Room B-136, Ground floor, Shapiro Undergraduate Library

Posted by hampelm at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2007

HTML-formatted emails

John C. asked about how to author HTML-formatted emails.

Hand-authoring and testing has been the best solution for the Residential College in the past. We test each mailing in several clients: UM webmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and GMail.

Campaign Monitor also has some suggestions about using tables for layout.

Especially important to pay attention to are updates in Office 2007 and CSS support.

Posted by hampelm at 03:05 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2007

Welcome to Field Guide

Field Guide is a resource for digital developers at the University of Michigan. Our goal is to make the new in our digital empire findable and extensible.

We collect and post the tools and ideas discussed on www-sig, the UM web special interest group; from communications and presentations around campus; and from individual contributors.

We also present new releases, redesigns and refreshes at Michigan, along with an analysis of their content, design, and architecture.

Your contributions make this site: you can send anything of interest to field.guide@umich.edu.

Posted by hampelm at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)

Identity: wordmarks and the block M

Guidelines for using the University of Michigan wordmark and block M logo, including how and where they should be used, are available from the identity guidelines site. Several versions of the block M and wordmark are available in eps (vector), gif, and tif formats.

Posted by hampelm at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

Link checking tools

Here are some tools used by UM staff to check sites for broken links:

The W3C hosts a simple tool.

Willie N. says: I use httrack. Its mirroring capability is what really makes it a compelling package, and it does link checking at the same time. Of course, it also has an option to only do a link check, and not store an offline archive of your site.

Steve B. was using (but eventually had some problems with) LinkLint.

The School of Public Health uses CheckBot.

Matthew R: the Web Link Validator generates a simple one-page HTML report.

Steve L: "I was using Xenu to scan for broken links, but its not too user friendly with reports.

Collected from a conversation on WWW-SIG.

Posted by hampelm at 04:08 PM | Comments (1)