>LOL! Chela, I promise you and all volunteers, nobody is going to need to become a CIO, and SQL-whiz, a DB Admin... Although it would be quite fun to be an SQL wiz, a DBA, a CIO or a web design consultant for bookshare... Just don't think I would fit their qualifications for it [I don't have any college degree] or did design for any notable companies. >Kim, in a car a dashboard is a bit of attractively molded plastic that hides the tangle of wires and the spots of grease >behind it. Online it's a an attractively designed page that hides lots of thought, and an alphabet soup of jargon, about >how to make the user's job as simple as possible. > >Andy nailed it earlier, "Sign into bookshare, go to the My Account link and you have a simple basic dashboard." And they can be quite complex too. I'm in the middle of designing a website that isn't quite as large as bookshare but isn't small either. It has a top level dashboard with lots of sub level dashboards under it. These other dashboards have other sub level dashboards under them as well. Just don't let the term dashboard or what it does throw you off. It would probably be better and more user friendly to call it a control panel. In UI design and the research I have done for usability on the website I work on, it is always best to keep the control panel as simple and as single "minded" as possible. This is why I recommended it be modular in design with each module keeping to a single focus. Here is an example. When you sign into bookshare and go to the my account section, you have a top level control panel. It lists all parts of your bookshare account: 1. Personal info like username, email address, password and contact info. 2. Student status if any 3. subscription status/level if any 4. Volunteer status 5. account history which lists the books you downloaded to date. 6. payments if any 7. Proof of disability and so on. If possible, we will call this the "my account control panel". This control panel has the "modules" listed above plugged into it. When you click on one of the links for any section above, there is info and most likely some settings you can change. These could be classified as control panels themselves. If you look at it from this point of view, the entire bookshare website could be classified as one very huge mega control panel/dashboard. It just doesn't sound fun, friendly or normal to do this. For most people, this is why dashboard or control panel is always left out when talking about web design and application development. Well, for the most part. You have directions in some websites or software that will say something like "To access [whatever], sign in, go to the "settings control panel" and [do whatever]". I think the term dashboard/control panel has been stereo typed to make people think that either: 1. It is some huge foreign concept they have to learn, 2. Only related to settings in some application somewhere or 3. Is very hard to use. Everybody, every day, uses a dashboard or control panel even if you aren't aware of it. Some of the better designed ones make it so you can't really tell or think about it. Some of the more ill designed ones will make it obvious that this is what you are doing. Either way, I don't intend on bogging everybody down with lengthly descriptions of dashboards/control panels and get into modules or modular design but thought I would give a basic idea of what this idea is about. On the other hand, if anybody wants/needs to know more about it, let me know. To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.