From wramey@willamette.eduWed Jan 31 13:54:37 1996 Date: Mon, 29 Jan 1996 15:50:07 -0800 (PST) From: Will Ramey To: Willamette Assistant Network Creators Subject: Theme for Lab Pages will. .---. .----------- / \ __ / ------ / / \(cc)/ ----- William Ramey ////// ' \/ ` --- wramey@willamette.edu //// / // : : --- Computer Science - Japanese // / / /` '-- http://www.willamette.edu/~wramey // //..\\ -----------UU----UU----- "Action is eloquence." -- William Shakespeare '//||\\` ''`` ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 22:19:51 -0800 (PST) From: Will Ramey To: "David B. Elliott" Cc: Bruce Arnold , Lisa R VanNatta , "Jeff M. Webster" Subject: Theme for Lab Pages We should begin to seriously consider a name for the content we are developing. Wanc is fine for a mailing alias, but I believe that the final product should not be named after a gradeschool euphemism for genitalia. Besides, it might sound a little hypocritical to say to a user, "Remember, the lab is rated PG, you can read about it on WANK." So this afternoon I was thinking.... we need a vision of what this whole thing's going to look like. A common vision so we can cooperate and work toward a common goal. As you might guess, it was one of those philosophical sunday afternoons. The outgrowth of all this was however rather practical; a set of ideas that, I believe, will provide the glue to join together all our hard work and allow users to surf smoothly from place to place in our web. My suggestion is that we name the structure "LightHouse." The connotations of help at sea, guiding light, clear vision, finding one's way home, etc. are closely aligned with what we want our structure to provide, and can be extended to all sorts of water-related analogies for sub-category pages. It's up to us how far we want to take it. If this all seems hard to visualize, let me draw you a picture: Imagine a picture across the top of the top-level page, a lighthouse at the left shining out across the dark waters with jutting rocks and a lone ship in the distance. The mock-up would just be this image and could be done pretty quickly; in the final product, however, a Java applet would animate that section of the screen, causing the light to sweep out across the ocean and lightning to flash in the background. As a part of the image, or possibly beneath it, the words "LightHouse: Your Guiding Light in the Lab" welcome users to the labs. Below, on the rest of the page, a series of categorized subsections along the same theme help users find what they want quickly. Each subsection has a small image or set of images related to its content. Some ideas: * Life rafts and drowning users for the help section * Swimmer with innertube / water wings for begining help * Row boat / sea-kayak for intermediate level help * Cliff-diving / para-sailing for advanced help (?!) * A rowboat that has sprung a leak fits in here somewhere. :-} * Ship to Shore radio for links to WITS email forms allowing users to ask questions of wits, help desk, labasst, etc. * Hurricane brewing on the horizon for Salem weather * Hot, "Babewatch"-style lifeguards scanning the horizon for links to the labbie section (including labbie homepages, etc.) * Scene showing Waller Hall on a tropical island for link back to WU homepage and/or WInK (Willamette Information Kiosk). * Fish and Chips for places to eat in Salem (OK, so this is a little overboard.) * A sextant for class-related links ("Making the Grade"?) (Maybe "Books on the Beach" is better?) * Boat in drydock with people working on it for "Publishing on the Web" section... (better ideas?!) * Surfers and/or windsurfers for "Surfing the Town" (links to local Salem and Portland sites of interest) * A compass at the bottom of each of the top-level pages to return to the top level, go back a level, up to the WU homepage, (and something else?) * Lots of others! Instead of horizontal rules (
tag) we could use long strips of waves... with little water skiers, jet skiers, and the like. This is in no way a complete list, just some that I remembered and a couple new ones it would be cool to have. Of course we'd want to do it all in a funny, non-condecending way... We wouldn't want users to think we actually thought they were "drowning"! :-} These are just a bunch of things I though up off the top of my head. I'm sure there are just tons of other great images we can make out of this. Please start day dreaming and mail the the group! will. .---. .----------- / \ __ / ------ / / \(cc)/ ----- William Ramey ////// ' \/ ` --- wramey@willamette.edu //// / // : : --- Computer Science - Japanese // / / /` '-- http://www.willamette.edu/~wramey // //..\\ -----------UU----UU----- "Action is eloquence." -- William Shakespeare '//||\\` ''``