Plan Your Area on Wings
Before you begin making files and submitting them, you should take some time to think about your area, and how it should best be structured. As your organization's representative, you have complete control over how your area of UBWings will appear and work. If you have looked at documents and services out on the WWW, you will likely have noticed that some are professional, powerful, and easy to use, while many others are difficult and not very useful at all. How often and how well your information is used will depend heavily on how well you organize your information. Because every organization is different, we cannot provide any definite rules for what you should and shouldn't do. However, here are some general guidelines you should follow as you plan:
What to Include
Many different kinds of documents you have may be valuable in UBWings, such as:- Information that is disseminated widely on paper, especially off campus where postage may be an undesirable expense. (example: the University Police brochures)
- Information that is frequently requested from your organization, such as office hours and guides to your services.
- Information that is updated regularly, when producing and disseminating new documents frequently can be expensive. (example: the School of Medicine and Biological Sciences News)
- Information that requires direct searches, and isn't very useful in paper form, such as large databases. (example: UB's on-line phone book)
What not to Include
Believe it or not, not everything can or should be made available in UBWings. The following kinds of items are examples:
- Documents or services that contain personal or sensitive information.
- Documents that are much more useful in paper form than online, such as manuals, novels, or other long texts that are intended to be read. People generally don't like reading large amounts of text when a book is more convenient.
Consider your Audience
Before you start, spend some time considering your audience. Who are they (your office, students, the Internet)? What kinds of information will they be expecting from you? What hardware and software will they likely be using? What is their expertise in your subject and in the Internet? The answers to these and other questions will affect the structure, content, and appearance of your area, including considerations such as:
- For users that are new to your UBWings area or to your subject, you should have some documentation explaining the terms and organization you use. However, don't put this in an obtrusive place where experienced users would be forced to look at it.
- Information that is timely (e.g. upcoming deadlines), vital (e.g. disclaimers), or frequently accessed (e.g. office hours) should be most prominent in your area. These items should be directly accessible from your initial page.
Use a Clear Structure
In the planning stage, develop a clear, consistent scheme or metaphor for organizing your information. If your area is well-designed, it will be easier for both newcomers and experienced users to use; if not, people will not be able to find the information they want. You may want to organize along administrative lines (i.e. each office has their own sub-area), or split the information up into separate areas for the various audiences who would be using it (i.e. students, faculty/staff, and non-UB people), or use any other scheme that will work for your area.
When you create navigational tools such as menus, be very clear in your wording, so that your users quickly understand what your documents contain, before they read them. (example: the CIT web page. Also, remember that different people organize information in different ways; while one person may look for an item under one category, somebody else may expect to find it under another. To provide flexibility, provide links to information from multiple sources. It is not necessary to labor over finding a "best" place for the information, since it can be in multiple places.
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