Steve McConnell, Public Affairs
News junkies at Berkeley can rejoice: Now there's more than just CNN and Fox to choose from. UC Berkeley's online NewsCenter, unveiled last month, delivers unprecedented coverage of campus happenings, from prize-winning research to passionate activism to record-breaking student athletes.
This new site, on the Web at http://NewsCenter.berkeley.edu/, is a major undertaking by Public Affairs and the University to gather in one place the most important, most timely, and most interesting news about the campus. The NewsCenter is updated throughout the day, drawing from the news staff at Public Affairs and from web news postings by colleges and departments across campus.
The NewsCenter is built of several flexible modules that allow us to broadcast news of both broad and specific interest:
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Since we know that not everyone will visit the NewsCenter often enough to keep up with everything we publish, we'll also bring our news to you. NewsCenter stories are organized by category, and visitors can sign up to get an email summary any time a new story is published in the category (or categories) that interests them. We've also included links to other web news sources on campus, so that those with deeper interests can go right to the appropriate site.
The NewsCenter, which took shape over many months of planning and coding, was designed to be both attractive and accessible. Designers from Public Affairs collaborated with the four-person web team to choose a palette and an overall look and feel that combine elegance with flexibility. We also plunged into Cascading Style Sheets for the first time to create pages with smaller file sizes and a larger array of typographical options. And Server Side Includes put the latest headlines on nearly every page in the site.
With one of the broadest audiences imaginable — everything from grandparents at home to programmers in the lab — we needed to make some hard choices about accessibility versus technology. The compromise we settled on was to keep the contents of the NewsCenter suite of pages accessible even to users with outdated browsers, but to accept that parts of our design won't be as attractive for those users. However, we also opted to allow all pages and type sizes to be scaled to meet users' needs, rather than locking in sizes that suit the design but shut out some visitors.
As with all things Web, the NewsCenter is never finished — we continue to add features and tweak existing pages to make them as informative and user-friendly as possible. And we continue to seek news tips and information sources throughout the Berkeley campus. Upcoming events can be submitted through the online campus calendar (http://www.berkeley.edu/calendar/). Story ideas, potential websites to feature and other content ideas are welcomed by all the members of the Public Affairs web team:
Make sure to check out NewsCenter.Berkeley.edu (http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/) for your daily dose of Cal news, and keep those cards and letters coming.
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Berkeley Computing & Communications,
Volume 13, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
Copyright 2003, The Regents of the University of California