redesigning lclark.edu

March 2009

The Redesign on the Source

This is just a quick note to let everyone know you can now keep up with the redesign on The Source. Just check the lower-right side under Community for a feed of our redesign updates.

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Make the whale happy; post a comment.

Migrating Types of Pages

Thinking this morning about the different types of pages (Trillium and otherwise) we will be migrating to the new website and our new content management system, LiveWhale, I decided to make a list online here at the redesign blog:

  1. Page content that can be moved to LiveWhale’s PAGES section on the new server with no problem and no changes necessary
  2. Page content that can be moved over but obviously in need a bit of updating on your part
  3. A news item that will be moved into LiveWhale’s NEWS section
  4. A calendar item that will be moved into LiveWhale’s EVENTS section
  5. Content from an email-only template that does not really belong in News or Events: Ignore, archive, or delete
  6. Tilde “~” sites of central importance: Ignore, but we will make a “landing page” in LiveWhale for us to link to first, before users go to the tilde site
  7. Tilde “~” sites of lesser importance: Ignore for now
  8. Gallery pages within Trillum: move into LiveWhale IMAGE and GALLERY sections
  9. Gallery pages on external sites like Smugmug or Picassa: Ignore
  10. Law and CAS alumni directories: Ignore for now

An interesting subset to all these is the use of forms.  For the most part we will migrate the current forms over to the new site as is, though RSVP forms will now be handled directly within the LiveWhale EVENTS section.

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5 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

Our launch date is June 8.

So how do you choose a launch date? I don’t know of any science to this. In my mind, the best thing you can do is adopt a pragmatic approach, so that’s what we did. Between Jason and Tonya from White Whale and Morgan, Gwyn, and, we simply assembled around a table in the Trail Room and while eating our lunch, picked the day in about five minutes.

Had you been at an adjacent table, and in the mind to listen in on our incredibly interesting conversation which often dwells upon the nuances of code, scripting and servers, this is how those five minutes went.

We started with some major dates and events. The admissions cycles finish up in/around May, at least for CAS and Law since Grad runs continuously, and the commencements run from mid-May to June 7. So we would either need to be well before or after the May to early June window.

Then, there’s the consideration of how much time we need to complete the tasks needed for launch. There is a lot on the plate, since the back-end of the site is being completely replaced along with the design and content we all see on the front. With only threeish months to late March or early April, we decided it was too soon, so launch would have to be post June 7.

And what about day of the week? I wanted it to be early in the week, so that we’d have the rest of the week to dig through broken apps, bugs, links and the like. I personally feel that no site launch is perfect or you took too long doing it and regardless, even if it is perfect, you should plan time to handle issues that arise. So that meant we’d launch on a Monday.

Since there was no reason to delay longer than June 8, that’s what it became…. 4:58, 4:59, 5:00. (And we’re off…)

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