Knee Deep in Web Content, Among Other Updates
We are spending much of our time these days writing content for the new site. This includes writing many profiles for the new “Faces” faculty, student, and alumni Flash piece, a bank of stories for the new home page’s Wall gallery, and content for the many new pages we will be adding to the site. It’s all hands on deck for the Communications and Marketing staff as each member of our office is writing Web profies. We’re also gearing up to have a handful of students to assist us during winter break with pulling content out of our current Web site and readying it so it can be easily posted in the new CMS.
This is the stage in a redesign project that is often underestimated, i.e., it always takes much longer to produce all the content you need to for the new site than you thought it would. The content includes not only page content but right column callouts, photography selection for galleries and headers, among others.
The good news is we have coded HTML templates for all of our major site sections, including our Gateway pages (Current Students, Faculty and Staff, etc.), for section fronts (department or section home pages), and lower level pages. Flash development for the home page and for the “Faces” feature is also well underway. Over the past few weeks we have been finalizing our Ingeniux site spec document, which details all of the Web development relating to the CMS. This development should begin very soon.
Last week, we signed a contract with Rackspace for Web hosting. The new Web hosting platform and configuration is very robust and will allow us lots of growth, flexibility, and adaptability moving forward. A big thanks to the IT staff and in particular Dolores Delviscovo, network administrator, for all her great work in securing hosting for the new site. Additionally, we’ve done initial configuration of our new Google Mini search appliance and our new Active Data Exchange (ADE) campus calendar. Additional work will be needed to integrate both site search and the ADE calendar functionality into the new Web site.
It’s been a very busy last couple of weeks.
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