Note to webmasters:
Most links to web pages on the main BCS site will now be invalid, although some redirects are in place.
For example, http://www.bcs.org/branches and http://www.bcs.org/sg are redirected to pages on the new site.
However http://www.bcs.org/BCS/AboutBCS/structure/boardsandcommittees/boards/KnowledgeServicesBoard.htm, which used to describe the BCS KSB, does not redirect anywhere and does not seem to have an equivalent on the new site.
If you try to reach the KSB page using this URL, you get a blank page rather than a page not found error.
This probably means that you can't use automated link checkers to determine which links are broken and need to be updated. You will have to do this check manually.

I do think the technical articles have the potential to be useful, but I wonder how well this will scale when more and more are added. There will be some need to filter them by subject area, which means that some kind of classification/taxonomy will need to be applied.

Conrad Taylor

Stats for the BCS Oxon website show usage of MSIE down to nearly 60%.
It would be nice if the new BCS website recognised Firefox and Opera by using title= on images as well as alt text.
Firefox and Opera correctly display the alt text only when images are not displayed.
The title text is displayed on hover whether or not the image is displayed.

As a usability point, the alt (and title) text for the BCS logon on the top navbar should tell the user it contains a link to the home page. In terms of mouse movements it's easier to click on the logo than moving halfway across the navbar to click on “Home”

The BCS webmaster tells me that the Box system has a URL re-writing facility – once this is setup we can make the more ugly URLs (like server.php?show=nav.5813) display the appropriate alias instead...
The aliases should eventually perform the function of providing a more friendly URL and something that can be used as a permanent bookmark URL too.
There are over 350 aliases in place at the moment and he hopes to publish a list of common ones for groups to use (but of course once the URL re-writing is in place people will be able to see more obviously what the aliases are!).

Hi all,

Obviously there will be things we can improve on in the first instance of the new site, but I hope you see the new site as a vast improvement on our previous versions. We're continuously working to improve the site, and I'm more than happy to hear about any ideas or suggestions you have.

Regarding Adrian's point about title attributes to images – we are looking at a mechanism for putting this in place for all our image files. They all have alt tag descriptors at the moment. We'll also look at extending the description on the BCS logo to include words that state it's a link back to the homepage – this is a good idea.

Carl Harris
BCS Webmaster

I have to say that I don't yet welcome the new BCS Web site *design*,
though I am sure the content management architecture is a great
step forward. My main concerns are that the site has a kind of
“brochureware” flavour, seems very light in actual content that
might encourage visitors to stay and learn, and adds layers of
intermediate pages with very little significant on them, adding
to the number of clicks before you find what you want.

Some of these are interface design issues and some of these are issues
of content and editorial effort, and I am sure that they can be fixed
over time.

As an example of what I mean by “real content”, take the excellent and
thought-provoking Needham Lecture by Professor Ian Horrocks in December.
Having gone to the effort of organising the lecture, which was over-susbscribed
so that folks had to be turned away, I would think that posting the lecture in
some form would be a great resource for the BCS community and indeed the
world. But when using the search facility, all I have been able to turn up
was some photographs taken on the evening.

Perhaps the web site would prove its worth more and gain more visitors over time
if it behaved a bit more like a portal. If I visit the BCS News web site, not only
do I find BBC-generated content, but also useful links to related content elsewhere
on the web (with the understandable disclaimer that the BBC is not responsible for
the content of external sites).

At a minimum, the BCS Web site could advertise and provide links to articles and
resources on the BCS Specialist Group websites.

Conrad Taylor

Carl wrote «Regarding Adrian's point about title attributes to images – we are looking at a mechanism for putting this in place for all our image files.»
Box claim to be good on cross-browser compatibility issues so I would hope they would have some way of automating this. In fact I'm surprised they didn't pick it up the need for title= on <img> tags themselves.

The Glossary is a nice idea in principle, but the current version is
rather embarrassing (for a national computer society's main Web site).
Is there the possibility of collaborative activity to improve this?
Might the Specialist Groups help? In the area of electronic publishing,
graphic file formats and the Web, my own personal teaching Glossaries
are more accurate and comprehensive. Might they be usefully folded
into a broader computing glossary project for the BCS Web site?

Conrad Taylor

I notice that the homepage of the new BCS website contains no news or current information.
Nearly every internet site, and particularly those of other Professional Societies, has something about latest news and/or coming events on their home page.
Best practice normally dictates that if you want people to come back to your home page, it should be updated frequently.
Now that we have (as I understand it) a grown-up content management system, it should be possible automatically to incorporate the latest headlines or upcoming events.

The old BCS website did have news on its home page.
Was it a deliberate design decision to banish all news from the home page, and if so, what was the thinking behind it?

I agree a glossary is a good idea.
(I could remember having seen it but not how I found it – once I refound it the only way to go from a glossary page is back to the home page – but that's another story)
It would be unreasonable to expect the first manifestation to be complete and fully formed, so not surprisingly some of the explanations are quite simplistic.
So the thought occurred to me: why not (to quote Chaucer) make a virtue out of a necessity and inviting new or expanded definitions from visitors to the site?
A wiki would be ideal for this..

hi Adrian / Conrad?

regarding the glossary, I'm very keen to extend it (it's a bit basic at the moment). We've been using the BCS Glossary of terms as a point of reference for most things (to keep consistency), but it's just a staring point and if you have anything you'd like to contribute towards the glossary I'll be more than happy to include it. I know that the working party who produce the Glossary book are keen to work on this too as an evolving part of the site.

The new CMS can of course handle the population of dynamic news listings etc – so the homepage could easily be adapted to include this. We are trialing the existing approach to see how things go – if click through rates are low then of course we will change how this works. There are some logical places the news listings could go, so we'll take a look at this over the coming weeks.

Conrad also mentioned having links to other valuable resources in the same way BBC do – we will be doing this too, and I already have a resource of links to add to some parts of the content/site. Again happy to receive anything you think would be valuable to mention against particular areas/content.

Conrad also raised a good point about reports of events etc. We really need to get this type of content on the site, and now HQ has a dedicated editorial team this will be one of their many areas of coverage I'm sure. I'll certainly pass this feedback onto Brian who I know will be keen to cover things like this.

Carl

Carl, I have posted a glossary that I've developed for some years for use in teaching
printing and electronic pre-press and publishing, which might be one quarry for terms:
it is at http://www.epsg.org.uk/glossary/draft-gloss.html. 370 terms, but many need
weeding out as they are related to pre-electronic print practices.

Jean Roberts says she also has a glossary of terms in Health Informatics which she
could contribute to any such endeavour.

David Penfold points out that it would be hard for the BCS to match the quality of
the FOLDOC computing reference at Imperial College, which has about 37,000
terms; perhaps it would be better to refer to that?

Conrad

Cosmetic:
I wonder whether any thought has been given to providing a favicon.ico file for the site?
If you visit http://www.oxon.bcs.org with a modern browser such as Firefox or Opera you will see a little BCS key displayed next to the URL in the address bar. IE will display the same key but only when you bookmark the page.

Use of this little feature would help visual identification of BCS pages in their bookmarks folder and would also demonstrate to people who know about such things that we understand the technology..

For more about favicon see http://www.favicon.com which reminded me that you can provoke IE to display the favicon without explicitly bookmarking a page by using the trick described at http://www.favicon.com/ie.html

Hit rates etc
Carl talks about click through rates.
This reminded me of a talk by one of the web designers for the Olympic sites in the days when IBM built the Olympic sites.
He said that it was easy to inflate hit rates by designing a site where the users had to click on several pages before they could find what they were looking for.
His aim was to keep hit rates down by designing a front page which provided the key latest information. He considered his design a success if people looked at the front page and then left the site.

Clearly the Olympic sites are a special case but this is a point well worth bearing in mind rather than just looking at overall page hit rates and click through rates.

Thoughts on URLs
when I try to find the map that used to be at http://www.bcs.org/BCS/Contact/Maps.htm I get a completely blank page.

Obviously with the new site users will accept that some links have to be changed.
But when I see a blank page my first thought is that the server or the network may be down.

Is there some way, when a user tries to access an obsolete link, we could return a default page with a helpful error message?
Something like we do on the BCS Oxon site: have a look at http://www.oxon.bcs.org/nosuchpage.htm
Even a 404 error would be better than a completely blank page.

I don't actually think that providing redirects for every single page from the old site is the right way to go, because you will be then stuck with maintaining those for ever.
It would be good to have people-friendly URLs but don't think it's essential for all the old URLs to be carried over (as long as users have a way to figure out what the new user-friendly URL is)

I used to be able to bring up the list events for a month and immediately be able to see where these were taking place. In this way I could match this with my itinerary and book up the events that I was able to attend. I see now that this is not possible and I have to open up each one to see where it will be held. To illustrate the difficulty, in March there are 85 events in the events list; it would be an impossible task for someone that is busy to open all of these individually to find out where they are taking place and at what time – and I would suggest a soul destroying one for those that aren't! It's great that there are 85 events in a typical month but can we please see the time, venue and city on each event in the monthly summary as before? David Miller

Hi David – we're in the process of moving all the events into a new database in the back office, once we've got this together we'll be able to display the events in an automated way as you suggest. In the meantime we'll look to make some improvements to the existing display to make this more user friendly.

Adrian – regarding the favicon file, do you mind if we use the one you are using?

C

Regarding coverage of events on the BCS site:

I agree it is good that there is a dedicated editorial team now working
for the BCS, but I fear that one might get on occasion only a trivial
report of BCS events, were one to rely only upon a computing generalist
(so sorry, Brian R!).

One of the problems with computing as a subject domain, is that it has
expanded so grossly that I suspect that few could intervene as a global
subject-domain expert. One needs a stable-full of people, each of whom
would really know their own stall intimately. Yet who can speak the 
common horse-language to span from stall to stall?

To give an example the bruises of which I am still feeling: I just did a
write-up of Professor Ian Horrocks' Needham Lecture on “Ontologies and
the Sematic Web”. I hope it will shortly be published on the BCS website,
the EPSG website, or both. In writing that up, I was so far towards the
edge of my domain understanding that I felt like one of those deperate
yachtsmen tacking to windward, and hanging dangerously outside the
boat's hull while tacking so!

Think I did OK; but it took a lot of dedication to searching and reading,

To edit and add valuable knowledge resources to the BCS Web site.
I think we will need a lot more discussion between the SGs and other
places about where the BCS's “experts” live.

And maybe journalistic hacks like me who try to render these arcana
into human-processable form can play a part.Hope so.

Conrad

That's a good point, Conrad.
I have previously advocated following the lead of the MIT Technology Review and using content – possibly blogs – written by SMEs (Subject Matter Experts).

If, like the MIT TR, the blog headlines were incorporated into the BCS home page automatically, it would keep our home page looking fresh. As it is, as week has gone by since the new-look website was launched and the home page has not changed at all.

Of course this is a matter for the editorial team and not the webmaster.

The MIT approach which Adrian mentioned is interesting, and
I like the result, but I cannot imagine that approach working
within the BCS. Not for technical reasons, but political ones.
The MIT Technology Review mechanism seems to run on a
basis of trusting the regular writer/bloggers, whereas trust
is not a commodity in ample supply in BCS Management, as
far as my experience suggests! There would be too much
fear of being found to host something to which someone
might have an objection.

Perhaps, however, one organisational environment in which
Subject Matter Experts could be selected or vetted would be
in the Forums. Each Forum has an Expert Panel, doesn't it?
And those experts, though they might be too busy to write
contributions on a regular basis, might have the time to run
an eye over some other contribution, and see whether it was
something the BCS might feel comfortable establishing a link
to or hosting on its own pages.

I am not even sure if there is a great need for the BCS Home Page
to change regularly; to look “fresh” as Adrian puts it. It isn't a news
site, but an organisation's home page. To have lots of sensibly
labelled links to useful parts of the site would seem to me to
be a higher priority, and within that there could be resource
pages leading to useful solid content that could accumulate
progressively over time. Call me a killjoy, but I'd rather the
Web site looked Serious and Useful, rather than that it looked
Up To The Minute.

Conrad

I see what Conrad means about the BCS website being starting point to find information about the society and hence the home page not needing to change very often.
But I think it's possible to do both: to act as a starting point for information and to give the latest news.
At the very least it should be possible to have an upcoming events area on the home page dynamically generated from the events database which would give the impression that the society was alive and active, and once this was programmed the frontpage would be updated daily without any effort on behalf of the publishing team.

I followed some links from today's “eBCS” newsletter and noted some things about
the BCS Web site which cheered me greatly. First, I see that the process is now
under way to provide more memorable URLs and I particularly welcome the new
URL "http://www.bcs.org/membersgroups".

Second, I see that we have at least one bit of A / V? multimedia on the site in the
form of a Flash movie (at http://www.bcs.org.uk/student-tour).

Carl, it would be really interesting for me and Adrian, both of whom were very
ctive as you know in the Streaming Media initiative, to be kept abreast of these
A / V? developments and how they are implemented. Was the Flash movie developed
in house by BCS personnel, or commissioned? If the latter, how much did it cost?
What lessons have been learned by the BCS in venturing into Flash A / V? media?

Conrad

Yes it's a good start that we have links such as http://www.bcs.org/events/datamigration
However when you follow that link it is aliased to http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3130 and that's what appears in the address bar of the browser.
When you are looking at a page you have no real way to tell whether it has an alias and if so what that alias is.
I think that Carl is aware of this and hope that he will be able to fix it.

Is there any process or project management to cater for change requests to the “new” BCS website?

The project management of the webiste development leaves much to be deisred. None of the main representative Member goups, SG, Branches, YPG or International were ever consutled. Surely they are the primary stakeholders?

Howard Gerlis
SG Executive Chairman