Today, when Jon was in the Traveler office scanning past yearbook covers for the archive section of the site, he found a gem: a VERY well preserved edition of the 1907 Cardinal. From the founding of the yearbook in 1897 until it became the Razorback in 1916, the Arkansas book was called the Cardinal. (The Arkansas mascot was, in fact, the Cardinal until 1910.) Our oldest copy of any book is from 1911, and we have to keep it in an envelope to preserve the pages that aren't connected to one another anymore. Therefore, this was an amazing find. 

Labels: 1907 Cardinal, history, past yearbooks

I feel the title of "webmaster" should remind people of cheesy-fingered overweight world-of-war-craft men. Is that who I am? Maybe inside. DEEP inside.

We've made it about a week since moving everything from /new/ to the main location. There are some obvious changes, and some not-so-obvious.

First, I wanted to share some yearbook.uark.edu history. Shannon reminded me of how dreadful some of the old designs for the site were. I had some fun clicking threw the old sites with archive.org.


In 2002, the website had a 90's journalism vibe. It looked like a website you'd visit for daily headlines on campus, but sadly the content didn't agree with its design. Not to mention it was laid out with tables!

But that's okay, it was 2002. There was also a nonfunctional "archive" section; much like ours today (this will change soon). Sometime later that year a new design emerged, borrowed from the 2001-02 yearbook.

Note how the centered, floating site remained, yet most other elements are dropped. A swirly Zapfino typeface appears snuggling with "Georgia, Times New Roman, and serif" for the content text. The links and header are embossed and cut with Photoshop. This would have been Photoshop 6 or 7, and guessing the Yearbook funding of the day, probably version 6. And then things stayed pretty much the same for awhile.

Until this May, when we launched our new website. It was extremely overdue and offered a very vibrant, fresh approach to the Razorback's online presence. Using a .png drop shadow, the still-centered site added depth. It also felt interactive, with "submit" buttons for photos and stories.

The navigation took a modern turn, opting for an all-at-the-top approach, rather than split on the sides. "Events" and "Archive" came closer together, along with other pages in the yearbook-webby family. The "sneak peak" section added insider images from the upcoming volume. This preview generates excitement, a little taste of what's to come. A "staff" and "about" section were added, giving a tangible feel to our organization. Who are we and where did we come from? (answers: aliens, mars)

Most of all the site felt robust with a rotating header image and hover effects. It also opted for a modern all-around sans-serif typeface for text, usually more appropriate for web space.

And now Vanna, if you'll be so kind:

Our new site. Yes, the above image looks like the site from May, but it has really changed. She's been outfitted with a new engine, with more standards-based coding and individual style sheets for individual pages. She's also capable of growing per page, with a background that adapts to more content, requiring less Photoshop cuts.

We've nixed some pages: Upcoming Events and Contact. The events page wasn't very, er...upcoming. And the contact page just pointed to our location, email, and phone. The blog should address the former, the footer should address the latter.

And we've added the "Photo of the Week" page, with pictures from our very fabulous photographers. I'm hoping to figure out some RSS secrets, so users can opt-in to seeing the photo-of-the-week as it's published. We've got this in the blog, thanks to Blogger's automatic RSS-generator. I hope it can go further.

I'm still stripping and debugging and re-working, so shoot me an email if you've found a goofy patch of yearbook web. I'm at jschleus@uark.edu.

Also, my next job is to re-work the archive section, which I'll preview next week. I'd love feedback, so feel free to comment or shoot an email.

Labels: design, history, razorback, web design, yearbook