The College of Letters and Science Unveils Improved Web Site

By Genevieve Shiffrar

August 16, 2000

Many months in the making, a redesigned College of Letters and Science web site arrived at http://ls.berkeley.edu/ on August 15. Whether you are a student, faculty member, staff person, alum, prospective student, or a member of the public at large, we in the L & S Deans' Office hope you will find the site fun, helpful and easy to use.

You'll enjoy new features like the Biological Sciences' Image Galleries of Integrative Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology, and the Physical Education Program. You'll enjoy the highlighted research projects and P. E. programs for their variety and beauty. In the Framing the Questions web site, you'll learn how scholars in the Arts and Humanities delve into "questions of belief and moral values, questions that access the past as a way of understanding our present and future."

More importantly, we intend this site to be as useful as it is fun. We know that some visitors arrive here to find a department in the College. From a pull-down menu on the home page visitors can jump to any department or major program in the College with a single click of the mouse. Similarly, a search field in the footer of all pages gets users to their destinations quickly and easily.

We want this site to be particularly helpful to faculty and staff. The Faculty & Staff Resources section is home to new content for the administration of academic personnel, human resources, and finance. We plan to expand this section significantly in the near future.

To satisfy those who don't have a particular destination in mind but want to explore the site, the College News section highlights important events of interest to anyone affiliated or concerned with the Unversity. Timely articles will appear regularly so that you'll always have something useful to read.

It is important for everyone to be able to access the information on the web, including those with disabilities. We use tools such as Bobby, a web-based program developed by the Center for Applied Special Technology that analyzes web page accessibility. We're proud these pages receive "Bobby Approval."

We are indebted to a large number of people for assistance in the design and implementation of this site and we wish to express our appreciation for a generous gift from a loyal L & S alum that helped finance this project.

We welcome your suggestions. If you have an idea for a news story, would like to see a new functionality in the site, or have discovered an error, please email web@ls.berkeley.edu.