redesigning lclark.edu

Information Design

Is there a CMS that supports custom/new content types?

Has anyone found a CMS that makes it easy to create a new content type? To me, this is such an important feature, but it’s been hard to find software that supports it. Drupal seems to only nominally support this — what it calls a new content type seems to be simply a web page with an admin-chosen type name.

Here’s what I mean by “new content type”, in case this isn’t clear:

A CMS usually comes pre-designed to support a few pre-chosen content types. For example, a common one is:

WEB PAGE

Attribute Name: Title
Data Type: Text string, <= 255 chars.

Attribute Name: Content
Data Type: Text string, unlimited length.

What I find extremely useful is a system that allows new content types with a new set of attributes to be created by the admin. Then, users can create instances of these types via custom-tailored dialogs. They’d then be displayed via custom-tailored style sheets. For example, a new content type might be:

COMMITTEE REPORT

Attribute Name: Committee Name
…

Attribute Name: Report Date
…

etc.

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Starting Monday March 17th, the Redesign

Some History

In mid-January, I sent out a request for proposal (RFP) to about ten different firms, large and small, local and distant, that had come up on our radar as potential companies that would be able and well-suited to help us form the strategy for our website redesign. Two weeks later, after a process of meeting and talking with several companies, six proposals were submitted.

Our small committee of Dan Terrio, Tom Krattenmaker and myself reviewed the proposals and selected two firms to invite to campus for informal two-hour “interviews.” (At this point, it should be noted that both firms were excellent and would clearly be able to handle the job. What we really needed to discover was what the working relationship would be like.)

Both accepted and we met with each of their teams during mid-February. Those sessions gave us lots to think about, and after consulting with members of New Media, PubCom and a few others across campus, it was still very close. (And what really threw helped us solidify our decision was the responses from the references provided.)

With that, I’m pleased to announce that White Whale (WW), a small educationally-focused web design firm from Oakland, Calif. will become our partner in forming the forthcoming web redesign strategy.

What’s Next

A week or so ago, we officially signed the contract and I’m happy to report that beginning tomorrow, March 17th, Jason, Tonya, Donald, and Alex — all of White Whale — will be on campus to meet with select groups over three days to hear from all of you what should become of our web site.

And as of this posting we’re opening up authorship of this blog so that WW can participate in and communicate about the web redesign as we’re all working through the process. (One of the reasons that WW rose to the top was due to their very collaborative process with their client-partners.)

So, if you have some thoughts about the web redesign, be sure to:

  • communicate them with any of us, WW, IT or New Media;
  • stop us if you see us in the Trailroom or elsewhere around campus; and,
  • watch this blog to continue the conversation.

There’s a lot more to come over the next few days in particular; I’ll be posting more soon.

David

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Site Architecture

Noah received the following message today — which we thought as indicative of why we are planning a redesign. I’ve posted my response as a comment.

David

—

Good morning, Noah

Since you are the one name I know in association with the College website, you are the one to whom I want to give some feedback—hoping that it will reach the ears of whomever is the “right” person.

Over the years I have spent a lot of time visiting college websites, trying to find various department and faculty information. From these searches, I have come to know what makes a site “friendly” and useful from the start. Alas, our own site fails in that regard.

This morning I tried to find out some specific department information on our site because my own computer (with all my information) is out being repaired, and the information in the printed directory is many years out of date. So I started at the top page, clicked on Academics, hoping to find a list of department names. Not there.

Then I clicked on College of Arts & Sciences, again hoping to find a list of departments. Not there.

This is definitely not “user friendly” and I’m looking from the inside! If I were a secretary at another school who was looking for department information, specifically the name and email address of a department secretary, how am I supposed to find it? When I DO get to a department site (Graduate School of Education) I’m offered a Faculty button, but there’s no Faculty & Staff button.

Many other schools offer department listings right up front, no need to keep digging and digging. On top of that, when I actually did reach one of the departments I wanted, I still couldn’t find out the staffing information, only faculty. This is not good.

At what point do the individual departments control what’s visible/available, and what is determined by a different administrative body? Also, at the uppermost levels (in terms of layers of web pages) who decided that the department listings would be so impossible to find?

Is any of this making sense? Do you understand what is making me so frustrated with our own site?

With great sincerity and a desire to help,

Charlene [Walker]

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The Future Home Page?

While I wouldn’t be so foolish as to say this is definitely the way to go, I am willing to throw myself and a few ideas out there for everyone to think on and consider. (With the hope that the end discussion yields that perfect solution.)

Mike Sexton had recently brought up a point I find compelling (and admittedly, I’m reacting here only to a portion of a recent discussion). That is, our current implementation of the spotlights utilizes three primary sources of content: the Chronicle, the Annual Report, and outside stories written about us by the press. With the outside stories to which we link, there is a potential loss for after reading the story, we may not see our site visitor return (or at least not immediately). Wouldn’t it be better if the content to which we link was on our site?

Certainly yes it would, and because of copyright law, we cannot of course simply duplicate their content, nor would I expect that we wouldn’t link to stories about us in the right context, but perhaps we should be trying to develop additional content streams to the home page that would be housed on our site and therefore, give site visitors more opportunity rather than less, to learn more about us.

With that, in the coming weeks, New Media will be moving spotlight management to a new blog which will give us an easy means of storing stories as well as the spotlight text. As yet, I don’t have a good mind as to from where new content streams will come. However, I have had some thoughts about how best to use this new feature.

My ideas are mostly longer-term (for incorporation into the redesign) as they require some form of home page segmentation by audience, where we open up the ability to funnel writing to each audience, hopefully delivering content originating from a member of that audience. Audience content streams available from the home page could look something like:

  • main > national news, etc. (similar to current content stream)
  • prospective students > highlight recent posts from student blogs, segmented by school of course, with audience-appropriate links, etc.
  • current students > highlight recent posts from student blogs, but links, etc. would be likely different than the prospective…
  • faculty/staff > highlight printed and presented, recent posts from faculty blogs… there are some law faculty members that blog, it would be phenomenal to develop some undergrad facblogs as well, but I personally know what a commitment that is
  • alumni > could do the same for faculty blogs… add chronicle + annual report content
  • donors/friends > donor stories? maybe integrated site to learn about our mission and why it’s important to support Lewis & Clark

Basically, I’d be looking to mine all sources for re-distribution if the writing/ideas/content meets the needs for the audience in question. (So, the writing-level, style, voice, etc. required for current students to prospective students is obviously going to vary from that for alumni or faculty.)

Tapping user-generated-content is really our best hope of telling the stories about L&C that we all hope to tell (and from a much more believable voice) so finding ways to encourage that type of content generation and percolating it up to inclusion is going to be a significant factor in our redesign.

All this is just the germ of an idea and needs lots more development, but is I hope somewhere to start. I just keep asking myself, in a perfect world, how would the home page function? I hope you do too.

Thoughts? Questions?

David

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Interim Home Page

New Media is about to launch an interim series of home pages for the period from now until the website redesign implementation replaces them. (As such, this is clearly not intended to replace the redesign process, but merely hold us over with some enhancements.) In case you are asking yourself why this is necessary at this juncture, here are the reasons for doing this now:

  1. Better Presentation — the interim design is more open, more welcoming and has much better readability.
  2. Improved Code — this design offers improved accessibility for the disabled and uses modern web standards, with proper semantic markup (valid HTML/508). And, the design has been successfully tested in browsers representing 98%+ of our current external site traffic.
  3. Better Content Organization — the design satisfies a need to have a “On Campus” news and events focal point separate from spotlights and “standard” news or events content streams.
  4. More Dynamic — the interim home pages are composed on demand. Many of the content elements are being supplied to the home page via RSS, which we will be able to repurpose for other site elements, or even for Facebook.
  5. Timing — the redesign Implementation is at least six months off.

As we have no intention of altering Trillium’s templates (there are many) nor the wish to go deeply into content and link issues on the home page (as those will rightly be discussed in the redesign process), this interim design does not move too far from Trillium’s basic design constructs nor rearrange page content significantly.

This interim design will be carried through to each of the school’s home pages, keeping intact their current respective differences from the home page (backgrounds, content, navigation, etc.). We are only providing the institutional home page at this point, since the changes to reflect each of the three schools are relatively minor from a technical standpoint. Other differences are outlined below in the design notes.

http://lclark.edu/index.php

Barring unforeseen issues, we are planning to launch this design on Thursday morning, 20 December. If you would like to reply with your feedback on this interim design, simply make a comment on this entry. And if you’re serious on participating, fantastic! You’ll want to read the design notes.

Thanks,

David
David W. McKelvey
Director of New Media
Public Affairs and Communicationsmckelvey@lclark.edu

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