Since mid-September, those who make their virtual home on the World Wide Web at http://www.cuny.edu (a.k.a. the CUNY Home Page) have been treated to a dramatically different environment that has been nine months in the making. This "home improvement" is a direct result of a collaborative effort of the Office of Budget, Finance and Information Services under the direction of Vice Chancellor Richard Rothbard and the Office of University Relations under the direction of Vice Chancellor Jay Hershenson.

Now the CUNY Home Page offers a wealth of information about CUNY itself and, through hotlinks to a wide range of public Web sites, situates the University squarely in the larger civic and governmental context - city, state and national - of which it is an integral part.

"CUNY has been serious about Web technology since its inception," CUNY/CIS Dean Michael Ribaudo observed on the release of the new CUNY home page. "In the early days, we were one of the first public institutions in New York with an established presence on the Web. We've long since outgrown that first modest home page and it is a pleasure to welcome visitors to our new site."

The site re-design was accomplished by a talented project team of CUNY/CIS staff under the direction of Colette Wagner, Director of Education, Training and Staff Development. Eddie Huey, a recent honors graduate of the College of Staten Island's Computer Science baccalaureate program and a popular trainer in the CUNY Open Systems Center (see FYeI Spring 1996), was the chief architect of the new site, providing the technical and artistic design that unifies this complex resource. Yolonda Batey of CUNY/CIS contributed her special expertise in the construction of hyperlinked documents, particularly in the "Admissions" and "Events & People" segments of the new site. In the process, Batey also became expert in the conversion of graphs and charts into Web documents.

Vice Chancellor Richard Rothbard provided crucial conceptual input to the project at every step of the way: "I wanted the new CUNY Home Page to reflect the mission, the diversity and the quality of the University - in short, to be an attractive, welcoming place where visitors can get a real sense of what CUNY is all about." By an odd coincidence, Rothbard, Ribaudo and the CUNY/CIS project team provided very special insight in this regard as they share a common CUNY heritage as alumni of Baruch, City, John Jay, LaGuardia, Queens and Staten Island Colleges.

The design team faced many challenges. One crucial factor was the creation of a distinctly New York character for the new CUNY site. "We knew that our clickable CUNY Map as a graphic representation of CUNY's scope of service to New York was an important element," said Colette Wagner, who also directed the development of the original CUNY Home Page two years ago, "but that was not enough." Now, in addition to a completely revised CUNY Map, photographs of major New York City points of interest chiefly contributed by Aron Eisenpress of CUNY/CIS (see the "People" profile on page 9) provide backgrounds to the new CUNY Web site and illustrate the link between CUNY and the city it serves.

Huey and Batey worked closely together to ensure that the site reflects modern graphic capabilities and is easy to navigate. They tested new designs on multiple browsers, implementing such Netscape features as frames on the CUNY Colleges page and providing visitors using other browsers a non-frames option for access to the college descriptions. The technical design of the frames/non-frames CUNY Colleges listing was one of Huey's major contributions. In the process, he integrated text from Access to Excellence (an annual publication of the Office of University Relations), the Freshman Guide to Admissions and the Transfer Guide (annual publications of the Office of Admissions Services) and established links from these pages to existing campus servers.

Batey's work on the design and layout of CUNY Admissions documents, actually re-conceptualizing print documents for the hyperlinked environment of the Web, provided the source materials for his efforts. The programming environment in which they worked to develop the materials for the new site included HTML, Java, JavaScript, Adobe PhotoShop and Adobe Acrobat among others. Of their experiences in developing the new CUNY Home Page, Batey and Huey are in complete accord: "The project gave us a whole new view of CUNY- an opportunity to think about the way others view CUNY, not only technically but also as a university. We met some wonderful CUNY people in the course of doing our work and, at the same time, we hope that we've put a welcome mat to CUNY out there on the World Wide Web."

Collaborators on the CUNY Home Page kept the new materials flowing in. Pamela Bayless, Director of Media Relations, was a key player in the development of the site. "The press is increasingly using the Internet as an information resource," Bayless notes. "It's a pleasure to be able to refer reporters to our updated Web site for Board meeting agendas, the budget request, press releases and other vital information about CUNY."

The new CUNY Home Page features important repositories of institutional information like the previously mentioned publications of the Office of Admissions Services, the meeting calendar of the CUNY Board of Trustees, links to existing CUNY College Web sites and available course scheduling information, the CUNY Citizenship and Voter Registration Programs, the programming schedule of CUNY-TV (the University's educational cable television station, Channel 75) and a host of other resources. It links to CUNY+, the University's online automated library system, and through the convention of "Other Links," references important national, state and city information servers.

We hope that the CUNY Home Page will continue to be a work in progress - bringing important information about the University to our constituency via the Internet. Two of our major site contributors, Genevieve Mullin, Secretary of the Board of Trustees, and Deborah Paroulo, Director of the Office of Admissions Services, echo these sentiments. Mullin celebrates the new site and the opportunity it provides to make information about by-laws, policies and procedures of the University accessible at the fingertips of an inquiring public. Perhaps Paroulo says it best when she asserts that "this is only the beginning of providing the most easily accessible and the latest information about the 1,300 programs and comprehensive services offered by The City University of New York."