About the CITES Web Site

CITES > web site > about this site

About this Site

This site, in addition to orienting the University community to CITES, serves as an online manual where you can find answers to technical questions about CITES services. While there is much here that might be of general interest, our primary audience is the University of Illinois community in Urbana-Champaign.

Beyond providing information technology services, we hope that CITES can take part in the broader educational mission of the University. To this end, we are working to make this web site a growing repository of technical knowledge for those who are interested in learning more about computing, networking, and telecommunications. We are compiling a Glossary of Technical Terms and Acronyms (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/glossary), linked to from technical terms appearing throughout the site. We are also continuing our series of Computing and Networking 101 documents: short, accessible articles on technical topics (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/101).

We are interested in your feedback. Your input will help us identify problems quickly so that we can improve the quality and usability of these pages. If you have suggestions, please let us know.

To give more general feedback on CITES services, fill out our online customer comment form.

Navigation

Our main improvement of the site for this revision is the implementation of jump pages. Under "Services by Category," links take you to pages that contain the most frequently used links for that service category. It is our hope that these jump pages will enable users to find the information they need more quickly. Our Complete List of CITES Services (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/services) is a comprehensive index of the CITES services and their relevant documentation.

In addition, we are continuing to develop our "Services by Audience" links, which orient you to services based on your role in the university community, whether you are a faculty or staff member (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/staff), a student (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/students), a classroom instructor (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/instructors), a technical support provider (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/techsupport), new to campus (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/newtocampus), or any combination of the above.

We have also instituted permanent, intuitive URLs for all major services and service categories. Typically, each service is associated with a short name. For example, CITES Express Email has the short name "express." CITES Express Email documentation can be found at http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/express, and the web interface for the service itself can be found at http://services.cites.uiuc.edu/express.

Finally, our search engine (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/search) has proven to be a useful method for finding specific information.

Accessibility

Our web site is designed with accessibility as a primary consideration. We forgo graphics, multimedia, and plug-in-dependent features, in order to make the site transparent, dependable, and fast for a variety of users working from a variety of platforms and connection speeds. The purpose of the site is to enable you to get the technical information you need as quickly, simply, and intuitively as possible.

We use no formatting for the body text. Except for the CITES mark and the navigation bar along the top, images are used only when helpful and are labeled with alt (alternative text) tags. Although we do use tables to lay out non tabular data, we preview our pages on lynx (the text-only browser) to ensure that they are readable, and that the text falls in a sensible sequence when removed from the table structure. We use cascading style sheets, and are gradually expanding our use of them, in order to separate presentation from content and make page sizes and download times smaller. Our headings (titles and subtitles) use the heading tag to make the pages easier to navigate by keyboard shortcuts for users who cannot use a mouse. We do not use frames or layers. Especially for longer pages, we provide tables of contents at the top to make it easier for users with voice readers to determine the contents of a page without having to read the whole thing.

Notation and Style Used in CITES Documentation

Here is a summary of key features of our Style Guide (http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/styleguide) from the user's perspective:

When indicating text that would appear as the input or output of a computer, we tend to use a monospaced font:

quota -v

Italics indicate the title of a published book or periodical:

Life With Unix

Boldface, and only boldface, is used for emphasis:

Do not immerse your computer in water.

Links are usually indicated with the full URL. We do this to make it easier for the user to determine whether the link leads to a different web site, as well as to ensure that those links are still useful if the page is printed.

We do not recommend browsing Superbad (http://www.superbad.com) when you are supposed to be doing your homework.

Suggested Browsers

Our web site is optimized for the following browser and version combinations:

Firefox 1.x (Macintosh/Windows/multiple Unix flavors)
Internet Explorer 6.x (Windows)
Internet Explorer 5.x (Macintosh)
Mozilla 1.4 (Macintosh/Windows/multiple Unix flavors)
Netscape 7.x (Macintosh/Windows/multiple Unix flavors)
Opera 7.x* (Macintosh/Windows/multiple Unix flavors)

* you will experience problems with Bluestem-authenticated pages and Opera)

Netscape, Mozilla and Microsoft offer freely available browsers.