Column 2 - TheMeasurementGroup.com

Our First Six Months

The web site by The Measurement Group became fully operational on October 1, 1996. From that time to the present, we continued to add content on almost a daily basis. That content focuses on our mission to provide evaluation, program management, action research, and measurement expertise to health care, mental health, and substance abuse treatment providers. Additions to our original materials range from evaluation resources to reports of progress by the care providers we assist and materials for running effective health care, mental health, and substance abuse treatment programs.

In particular, much of the content on our web site focuses on programs that provide treatment services for HIV/AIDS. The Measurement Group has supported more than 60 such programs through four cross-site evaluations and more than a dozen local evaluation and management support projects.

In January 1997 we re-organized our site and added a re-design in order to make the many materials more accessible. At that time, we developed redundant, but different, schemes for accessing the web site content. The "right side" frame of the site was designed to allow access to the contents in a straightforward outline way. To complement this, we introduced a set of buttons on the "left side" to allow the user to jump to large clusters of content organized using a different approach.

Experienced web users know that the state-of-the-art in web site design is now changing every six months or so. Mindful of this, and learning from our January 1997 re-design, on April 26, 1997, we introduced a second re-design of our site. We have maintained much of the same organizational structure, but we have tried to improve both the graphics and the speed with which the site contents can be downloaded. We have also eliminated the advanced feature of frames from the site since we – and apparently most other sites – have found that many users (such as those from AOL) continue to use older versions of browsers that do not support such advanced features as frames. While our site looks best using a video card with 64K colors, it will also work for color video cards with as few as 256 colors. Rather than maximize the site for the high-resolution standard (1024 by 768 pixels), we have chosen to maximize the site for the lower resolution of 800 by 600 pixels, which remains common.

Much of the content on our site runs as a series of presentations (or animations) originally programmed in Microsoft PowerPoint. In order to see these presentations, you will need to use a current browser (either Netscape 3.0 or later or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later) and to download the Microsoft PowerPoint Animation Player. This browser add-in is free and will greatly enhance the usefulness of our site for you. You may access this free viewer by clicking on the button labeled "Presentations" on our site and following the instructions for adding the viewer. If you have any problems installing the viewer, please call the Internet Department at The Measurement Group at 310.216.1051 and ask for help. We will be glad to provide it.

As with the second version of our site, C. Tai Kuo and I continue to be the primary designers of the site with Tai doing much of the actual web programming and site maintenance. We have been assisted in our work by Alyssa L. Leong, Clayton L. Meixel, Chermeen Elavia, Edward Sanders, and Lisa A. Melchior, Ph.D. These individuals have been helped on presentations and reports by Ruth Betru, Ariane Kawata, Viji Sathy, Diana E. Brief, Ph.D., and Robert M. Johnstone, Ph.D.

We very much appreciate your feedback on our site, and we hope you will send us email to tell us about both the problems and the things you like most on our site.

Thank you.

George J. Huba, Ph.D.
President
May 12, 1997
ghuba@TheMeasurementGroup.com

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