Over the last few months, I have been working with Ros O'Leary and a graphic designer to reorganise the site, update the content and make it much easier to find what you want. The most visible change is to the front page. The diagonal line of buttons connects you to the site's five main sections:
The index pages for each section are now accessible from every page on the site. You can also return to the front page from any page by clicking on the CTI logo in the top or bottom left corner.
Another change to the front page is that, from now on, it will state the latest change which has been made to the site, so that you will be able to see straight away if the site has been updated since your last visit.
On the each page (including, of course, this one) you can see two new buttons; Search CTI Economics and Contact CTI Economics. With the former, you can search the whole site, or indeed the whole internet, for a key word or phrase. The latter takes you to a page of feedback forms which you can fill in through your web browser- a convenient way for our readership to give us comments or suggestions on any aspect of the work of CTI Economics.
The forms allow you to:
Another invisible change is the addition of meta-data. These are pieces of information in machine-readable form, for the benefit of the next generation of web search engines and information gateways. For example, the hypertext version of each article in the latest issues of CHEER codes for the name and affiliation of the author, as well as a short abstract.
Finally, a change that will be invisible to all but a fraction of the site's users is that the pages have been formatted so as to make them readable in text-only browsers.
The web is advancing very quickly, and so even now we are thinking about future changes to the look and content of the site. Already there are new standards emerging which allow web sites to be given a more professional, magazine-like, look. These will be implemented on the site once the browser software to view these features is in more common use.
As for the site's content, we are hoping to make it broader, so that the CTI Economics site becomes a site that teachers of Economics visit not only for infomation on learning technology, but on most aspects of their work. We are looking into the inclusio n of:
I'm happy to hear any comments on our new direction, or any further ideas about what we should be including.
I can be e-mailed at <M.L.Poulter@bristol.ac.uk>.