redesigning lclark.edu

white whale

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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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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