redesigning lclark.edu

strategic marketing

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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