When it came to deciding on the visual design parameters, we went for 1024-wide for the simple reason that that’s how most of the web is working anyway. If you go to the Globe & Mail, or even many of our subscription databases, they have been designed for a 1024-wide screen, so there’s no reason why we should handicap ourselves for a layout that nobody uses. We’re not doing anything really sexy in terms of interactivity on the site, so “IE6″ doesn’t really come into it, I don’t think.

We addressed the audience thing head on, and of course there are waves of reaction to that choice. Our primary audience is undergraduate students at our campus. And of them, we are trying to answer the questions 80% of them have. This means that some of the quirkier things are harder to find, and it means that faculty questions are not answered on the first page. (They have to click the “faculty” tab, makng them secondarily our audience.) We have only been live a couple of weeks and I’m already really feeling the need for multiple views for our different audiences.

Our approach to that will be to create a website you have to log into. I know that will go over like a lead balloon, but if we had everyone logging in, we could deliver content to them based on their role and their current needs. That way we could properly address the needs of all our users.