Help wanted. Is there anybody out there in CRRA Land who can help me customize the look & feel of our "Catholic Portal"?

For better or for worse, people increasingly rank their likes or dislikes of a website based on it's graphic design. Certainly, usability, functionality, and completeness are very important qualities but so are aesthetics.

To create aesthetically pleasing websites a person today requires two specialized skills: 1) a formal understanding of graphic design (color, layout, typography, etc.), and 2) the ability manifest graphic design using HTML and cascading style sheet (CSS) technology. The former is embodied as an artistic flare. The later is akin to the painter's brush or the bluesman's guitar.

Alas, I do not have the necessary skills. After all, I think working both in terminal mode as well as at the command line are beautiful.

"sandbox" implementation

public interface

So, along with bibliographers who identify materials for the Catholic Portal, and along with catalogers who know how it has been organized, and along with systems librarians who know how to extract our metadata from our catalogs, we need competent Web designers.

Do you know of anybody in your institution who can help with this work? Like the other tasks surrounding the Portal, the work is ongoing but not constant. The short term goal is to give our current "sandbox" implementation of VUFind the look & feel of our "public" interface. Once completed we will be able to move the "sandbox" to production and dramatically increase the functionality of our interface.