This is a summary of the functional requirements for the redesigned IS&T web site.
- In general, the site will be more interactive and include more functionality (for filtering and sorting of certain information).
- Breadcrumbs on each page. These are navigational breadcrumbs, showing the path taken by the user to get to a given page. Additionally, if a page is accessed directly from outside the IS&T web site, a pre-defined breadcrumb will show, based on the page's fixed position in the web site hierarchy.
- Various pieces of pages will be expandable and collapsible.
- Ability to maintain state for a user session. For example, if the user collapses a content box, the box will remain collapsed for subsequent visits to the page during the session.
- Ability to customize the site in various ways. This requires user login and persistence of preferences and choices.
- There must be page components with dynamic content (for example Systems Status, What's New). There will be various methods of getting this content to the screen (RSS etc.).
- Some of this dynamic content must be context-sensitive. For example, relevant quick start classes. "What's new" or "spotlight" type areas could be populated via blog/RSS.
- A "Top 5 Questions" section, which could be pulled from a stock answers system. Certain questions/answers could be marked to appear in this area and time-limited. Context-sensitive top 5 questions.
- Ability to filter certain content by various criteria (e.g. software by platform, support-level etc). Ability to sort this data in different ways.
- A Support Page is planned. Dynamic elements here are "ask a question" which will search the stock answers system, and "submit a question" to the Help Desk, which will feed into RT.
- There was some discussion of tag clouds to identify hot support topics. These clouds may be filtered according to some separate choice of subject. We may want to have some way of marking topics so they have more weight in the tag cloud.
- Simple poll on each page to ask if the page helped. Perhaps also a text box to capture more information. Other useful information to be captured would be what did a user search on to get to the page and/or what was the breadcrumb trail that got them here.