A quick follow-up to my eariler post.
We've completed the help text for the AAAS search engine. I must admit I found the process of creating the text to be quite tedious. That's not to say that it wasn't worthwhile, though. Working with JBJ, who is probably the least technically inclined among the staff, proved to be most benefitial when refining the text. I believe we were able to produce something that is both clear and concise and will benefit our intended audience the most. I doubt I could have done as well with any other staff member. The combined talents of the techno-geek and the techno-novice appear to mesh fairly well for this type of project. As to whether or not we'll see any kind of return on the time investment is yet to be seen.
After a few meetings with JBJ and FM we decided to go ahead and make the page-level survey available on all pages rather than only a few, selected pages. The survey won't be presented every time a user loads a page, however, but randomly. We hope that random appearance of the survey will help prevent it from entering the user's "blind spot."
I'm controlling the appearance through a combination of cookies and javascript. SSI included files are not capable of setting a cookie, which is why I decided to use javascript. The only drawback to this method is that if the user does not have javascript enabled the survey will appear on every page.
I still need to go through and choose the pages that will not be included as part of the survey.
The site-level survey has changed little. The current thought is to link to it from the home page expando banner. I also provided a link from the page-level survey "thank you" message.
I'll need to spend part of this week documenting the survey code (my current policy for new development).
