Building Web Pages for the VAO

Many of us in the VAO will be involved in writing web pages.  This post discusses how we work together to build a coherent and consistent web environment, discussing what has been agreed and trying to identify questions that we need to address.

Classes of Web pages.

Per the discussion of the July team meeting, we define three classes of web pages according to the anticipated audience.

•  Internal web pages are intended only for the eyes of members of the VAO.  This may include the VAO wiki and raw Trac and JIRA web pages along with this blog.
• Public web pages are web pages intended to serve our role in the science community.  This includes our  science services, documentation, help pages, newsletters, forum....
• Outreach web pages are pages specific to our EPO efforts which are intended for non-science users. 

The recommendations of this memo are intended primarily for public web pages. Practice for outreach web pages will extend and modify the public web page policy.

Where do web pages go: physical?

Where feasible web pages should be included on the VAO's primary Web site (hosted at Caltech).  Documentation, software downloads, and simple forms can all be easily accommodated by the main web site.  Science capabilities, e.g., the VAO portal and cross-match services may need to be hosted on other machines.  This should be discussed in the operations plan for the service.

Where do web pages go: virtual?

All VAO web pages should appear with in the usvao.org web space.  This will naturally follow when web pages are included on the Caltech host.  If a service must be hosted remotely, then a web-address of the form xxx.usvao.org shall be aliased to the appropriate site.

How do we define the 'xxx's?

Currently we have help.usvao.org, and dev.usvao.org (which both link to internal sites).

How do we build web sites?

Do we want a content management system?  Do we build web sites as an operation on the SVN repository?

Do we want a standard form support system (a la ColdFusion)?

How do we ensure uniformity among our Web sites?

This would be one goal for a content management system.
Alternatively we could have standard CSS and HTML templates that all web sites are required to integrate possibly using different techniques.

What are the design elements that appear on VAO web pages?


Logo's, institutional references, style, ...

A general web design framework would be nice.  Probably User Support's role to answer.  One role of the content management system is to separate the design elements from the content, but that is unlikely to be entirely successful.

Do we need to identify logical cross-references?


One suggestion during the team meeting was that we should use logical names for links within the VAO (i.e., from the portal to the cross-match service) and have these resolved at some point.  This would allow use to each change locations for given services without breaking links.  It would also allow us to provide some support for handling references to services that are not yet available.

Do we want to do this?  If so how and at what level do we define these links?


Who builds web sites?

Can't place all of the burden on Sarah.

Automated creation by content management system in fashion similar to Jenkins testing framework?

Multiple authorized users at Caltech site?

Who authorizes creation and modification of web site?

At the team meeting we discussed this as a CMB responsibility and that is certainly the case for significant changes.  However if we want a responsive we site we probably need to allow much more freedom for at least some areas of the web site (e.g., latest news, personnel, faq).  Nor do we wish typo fixes to required CCB approval.


Added:
Sarah brought up some issues in the telecon including:

• What is the relationship with the document repository?
• We need to identify actual people involved at various steps.

Ani noted in the comments that we will want to have an expedited process by which the web master can update the page with the CMB's blessing without having to go through an actual meeting.