UNC-CH Grad School web discussion

...by Bob Stepno, featuring pages designed by Julia Bryan

This page has some of the Grad School Web page ideas we've been tossing around in the process of getting the student funding fact sheets and related pages in shape.

We would like to have more color and "action" on the pages, neither of which were possible when the original Grad School site was launched. For example, if you use MS Internet Explorer to look at Bob's Everything on one page demo, you will see a scrolling text banner, which could be used for bulletins about special events. (It would take a little more work to get the same effect for Netscape users; with this version they just see the banner message as a few lines of centered text beneath the "column" logo. But Javascript programs are fairly easy and can provide other kinds of dynamic text effects.)

However, "Everything on one page" requires people to scroll around the page and actually read -- and some people hate to scroll or read more than a minimum of text on the screen. (This page is a pretty good example of how boring that can be.) Computers and network connections are getting faster, so why not use a larger attractive photo?

Julia suggests this Picture of the fountain as a welcome could be programmed so that it would appear when you link to "gradschool@unc.edu" at which point you could either click on the picture to get a menu of the Grad website, or you could wait a few seconds and be transported there automatically.

As an alternative, the photo could have an abbreviated menu at the side, like this: Fountain with menu. The menu would be a shortcut to the pages within the site.

The top item on that menu, "Grad Home" would be the same page linked to the photo (or arriving automatically after a few seconds). It would take the place of the present Graduate School Home Page, which has been doing its job faithfully... including a brief description of each of the main pages at the Graduate School, which in turn give more information about the links to come. Following the original pages, these would be the main "topics" or "deparments" of the Graduate School: Admission, Student Services, Funding, the Bulletin, a listing of Graduate Programs, SPGRE, etc. We've tentatively added a "welcome" from the dean, which would include an outline of the administrative organization of the Grad School. And any of the pages could be horizontally linked to each other (such as the listing of graduate departments, publications, etc.)

Picking up the motif of the fountain's falling waters, here's what the Funding Pages would look like. This design breaks the general information into a series of small pages. We would also like to have a space for "bulletins" about imminent deadlines, special events, etc., and for more images of graduate students and faculty.

• Here's a sample Fast Fact Sheet (scroll to the end)
• Visitors would get to these fact sheets from tables listing UNC-CH and external sources.
• Here's Bob's earlier table listing all Fact Sheets
• Within the Funding Web, most of our work has been on "Fast Facts" sheets about each of the School's grant or fellowship programs, and a selection of external funding sources. At present there are about 20 of these under construction, each with details and links to the source when applicable. We also have a generic email address to "gradfunding@unc.edu" for more information.

A missing ingredient is a "Grad Web Map," a single page outline of the whole site, with each item in the outline linked to its page. This would give a visitor a quick overview of the "depth" of the site. Picture a Harvard outline of all of the Grad School's web pages, organized by administrative department or alphabetically, or whatever you prefer. To be brief, this page should have the titles of the other pages, but little or no description. (The descriptions would be on the each "topic" or "departmental" web page.