New Web Site Designs

Take a moment to look over two designs for the main page of our library's web site. The two site possibilities are still under development, and can be found at:

www.nelson.usf.edu/test
and
www.nelson.usf.edu/test2

Please view each, and list both the strengths of each as well as any areas of concern that you may have..... Along with being easier on the eyes, the main improvement goal for the new designs is to reduce the number of clicks or sub-pages that one uses to arrive at a destination. Rather than click through a sub-page, with the movement of the mouse a sub-menu appears for each catagory listed, and the patron can click directly to the informational page. This results in faster (and hopefully more intuitive) access to our site. Note that although the central submenu appears on the screen, it is not yet fully functional and continues to be in a production mode until all of design elements are in place.

Utilizing a combination of various technical goodies (Cascading Style Sheets, Server Side Includes and Javascripting) our page will become easier to manage and have a more uniform look.

New Server Purchased for Staff Domain

Secondly, the Systems Team is pleased to announce that a new Dell Poweredge 2500 server has been purchased to become the Backup Domain Controller for the poynter_staff domain. How might this benefit you? It should result in a faster login process and allow for fault tolerance for staff logins. In the event of a controller crash, all staff users will be still able to log onto the domain. The server will also host e-reserves Acrobat files for processing on their way to be loaded onto web servers in the Tampa library.