redesigning lclark.edu

February 2009

Summer ’08 to Winter ’09

[This post is part of a series. Read the first post.]

As you may have already read in our posts from last summer on the results of the strategy phase, we have a visual design for the institutional and school home pages, navigation and structure for the site as a whole (that removes the “dead-ends” that you can get stuck in jumping from school-to-school), and offers some new opportunities to create community through apps like The Green.

There was a lot to digest from the strategy phase, so we stepped back from the designs and settled in to the process of preparing for the implementation. Needless to say, when you plan to replace your content management system (CMS), re-organize huge amounts of content, rewrite other major segments of the site, and produce a new series of personal stories about LC people (“Uncommon Journeys”) that will be front and center on the new site, you have a bit to do.

Clearly, if we wanted to do this all ourselves, it would probably take something close to several years for New Media alone to complete it, especially if we were to keep most of our other existing projects afloat. That time-line, simply put, was too long. The web and other forms of electronic communication are a major factor in our strategic marketing for the institution as a whole, and the changes needed faster attention.

So we proposed to the President’s Strategic Initiatives Fund that we re-hire White Whale, the small web consulting firm with which we worked closely during the strategy phase, to join us on this adventure and help us remake the site. The Executive Council agreed with us, and we set about to hire White Whale again and otherwise get some new virtual servers set up, but this would all take a little longer than I had planned.

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Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Onward, Redesign!

Apologies as I have not written in some time, and there’s a lot to bring to the table today, so I may not be able to deliver it all in one post — and frankly, you probably don’t want me too either.

And before I start, I have to remark on one amazing thing that we continue to note. Typically, the implementation of a web redesign is a big scary thing for people, and yet at LC, we are finding that most people on campus have some good questions to check, but after that, they — or rather, you — are ready to embark on this adventure with us. And sometimes even more than ready — in that we can’t have it ready soon enough and the beta offers have been generous. I have to say, that willingness and acceptance makes a huge difference in how successful this new website will be. So thanks to everyone — it does indeed make a difference.

To say it’s hard to fit the big picture of a institution-level redesign the scale of Lewis & Clark in one’s head is a little true, at least for me, but I manage to squeeze it all in now and again, before some other piece falls out an ear. So instead, I rather think of it as a continuum — something like one of those photo sliders that allow you to scroll horizontally back and forth, focus in on the details and then pull back and glimpse the whole thing. (If you’re a Microsoft devotée, think PhotoSynth instead and you’ll get the concept.)

So, I’ll do something of that over this and next few posts. Step-by-step, or rather, aspect-by-aspect — snapshot-by-snapshot — I’ll outline a number of the major elements of the redesign, and with each include where we currently are, and what’s yet to happen.

But, before that, let’s start with a little background on what’s happened since the summer.

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One person has made the whale happy; will you?(Go ahead, make a comment…)