Site Hosting, Ingeniux Install, Campus Calendar, and Other Updates
A screen shot of the new campus calendar (beta version)
It’s been an incredibly busy last several weeks. Between juggling content writing, content migration, and setting up the technology to run the new Saint Anselm site, its been hard staying on top of everything. Over the past month and a half we’ve been configuring our new hosting platform with Rackspace. It’s a very robust hosting platform that will allow us to do a few things we haven’t been able to do to this point. The tech support at Rackspace has been great and they will provide us with another important layer of technical support for our Web site.
Last week we installed our new Ingeniux CMS on our servers. The new CMS comes in two parts, a design-time server, which is the server that stores CMS Web content and it is the software content authors and editors will access to edit pages in the new site. The design-time server then publish static pages out to a separate server called a run-time server. Changes and replication between the two servers are managed by peer-sync software. We’ve been hearing good thinks from the developers at BarkleyREI about the robustness of the new CMS.
Last week we also had our second walk through and review of all the new Ingeniux page types (Web templates) with BarkleyREI. It was very exciting to see everything coming together and to see just how easy it will be to post and manage content in the new CMS. The right column of the CMS will offer content authors many options from inserting photo galleries and video to pulling in Flickr feeds, YouTube videos, RSS feeds, and callouts to content on the site. Each department or section of the site will be able to have its own automated news and calendar areas. The new site will utilize a site-wide taxonomy (or keywords) allowing us to tag and distribute news content across the site.
The new site will also feature a vastly improved campus calendar, which will allow college departments to pull in events within their sites also using tags. I’ve included a screen shot of the calendar with this blog post and you can check out a beta version of the calendar at calendar.anselm.edu. Please note that none of the links in the header or footer of the calendar currently work as we still need to move the CMS to our Web server. The new calendar will allow visitors to subscribe to events, receive e-mail notifications and reminders, add to Outlook calendars, or bookmark an event to dozens of social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter. Both news and event categories will feature RSS, which will allow content contributors to syndicate content to any number of external sites. It’s important to note that a new campus calendar was one of the top three requests we received from students, faculty, and staff during the site discovery phase of the project.
Later this week, after BarkleyREI has finished running the site through quality assurance testing, we will start to build out the structure of the site (the site-wide navigation). Shortly thereafter, we will begin adding the thousands of pages of new and existing content that needs to be migrated into the new CMS. This is an enormous undertaking, one that will take several weeks to complete. At some point in the coming weeks we will have a beta version of the site available for the campus community to preview.
Lastly, we are currently behind on content writing, so this work will continue into the next several weeks as well.
Web Redesign Update / Tentative Site Launch Schedule
We are in the final months of the Web site redesign project that we have been working on for the past 18 months. I’d like to update you on our progress and seek some help as we prepare to switch to a new Content Management System (CMS).
Update
We are tentatively scheduled to launch the new site in late March. We are several weeks behind with finalizing site development, content writing, and content migration. You can follow our progress at http://www.anselm.edu/redesign or by clicking the link in the footer of the college’s home page.
Over the break, we pulled thousands of pages of essential information from the current site’s CMS in preparation to move them to the new CMS.
Much work remains, however, as we develop the new site, write content, and prepare for the migration.
For People Who Post Content to the Current Site
Please keep track of any updates you make to a Web site in the current CMS after Jan. 4, 2010. Keep those changes in a Microsoft Word document so we can incorporate them in the new CMS prior to launch. That way, the latest version of your pages will appear with the new site. Additional directions on this process are provided in this blog post.
For Those Who Maintain Non-CMS Sites
This notice does not pertain to sites uploaded via FTP, managed with software like Adobe Dreamweaver, or any other sites outside our current CMS. These pages will be automatically migrated to the new hosting platform the week prior to launching the new site. All faculty and staff will be notified via e-mail as we get closer to the date.
Thank you for your patience and for your assistance as we move through this exciting project. When launched, our new Web site will allow Saint Anselm College to tell its many stories in new and dynamic ways.
If you haven’t yet seen the new site design, I urge you to visit the design category of this blog.
Process For Tracking CMS Content Changes After 1/4/10
As part of the migration of content from the current CMS to the new system, we are asking CMS editors and authors to track any changes you make to content after January 4, 2010. Please provide us with your CMS content changes by following the process as outlined below.
- Create a folder on the ‘P’ drive under the ‘Web Redesign’ directory (‘P:/Web Redesign’). The folder name should be your department name or site name.
- Each new page or content change should be posted as separate Microsoft Word documents. If you make a change to a page, it’s easier for us if you simply copy the entire Web page and provide it to us in a Word document that includes the content changes. That way we can simple copy over the entire page to the new CMS. If you feel the need to highlight the exact changes you made on a page, please use either red font or the yellow highlighter formatting to identify the change.
- At the top of each Microsoft Word document, include the following sections:
- CONTACT: Person to contact if we have questions regarding the content changes.
- DATE OF CONTENT CHANGE: The date of the change (e.g., Date of Content Change: 1/13/09)
- NOTES: A notes section that describes the changes made to the page (please be brief)
- PAGE URL: The current URL of the page in the CMS
- PAGE LINKS: Include the full URL of all links included within each Web page. You can do this by simply including the link in brackets within your page content after the location of the link (e.g., visit our online calendar [http://www.anselm.edu/calendar] for more information.)
- Include all new images in a separate folder named “Images’ within your department directory (e.g., ‘P:/Web Redesign/Department Name/Images’). It may be best to provide us with a copy of the original, high resolution image as image sizes will differ in the new CMS.
- Include all PDFs, Word, or Excel documents within a separate folder called “Attachments” (e.g., ‘P:/Web Redesign/Department Name/Attachments’)
If you have any questions regarding this process, please contact Doug Minor, director of Web publishing, at 656-6184 or dminor@anselm.edu.
The Value of Content Sharing
One new feature on the redesigned site, which will be located in the left navigation column, is a new Add This widget, which will allow Web visitors to easily share content with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or via e-mail. If content can be more easily shared then it should increase traffic to our Web site and improve our search traffic. At least that is the objective.
If you read any popular blogs or online news sites, you’ve likely seen these sharing links at the bottom of an article. I’ve grown to really like these sharing features as it makes sending Web content to colleagues and friends a whole lot easier.
One popular sharing tool provider Share This recently published some interesting statistics on their blog on the value of content sharing. They note that e-mail still matters. Sharing content by e-mail made up the largest percentage of shares comprising some 46 percent.
“Despite reports of its demise, e-mail is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel. In our research, we found that 46 percent of shares came via e-mail, 33 percent from Facebook, 14 percent from other channels such as Digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc., and just 6 percent from Twitter.”
In the same blog post, Share This included data from their network of publishers that highlighted content sharing’s impact on overall site traffic, search traffic, and visitor engagement.
Sharing vs. Search
Many of [ShareThis's] publishers are seeing increasing results from sharing. Here are a few network-wide observations…
- Sharing can make up 5-10% of your overall traffic.
- Sharing can make up 15-30% of your search traffic.
- Sharing drives 25-50% more engagement (page views/unique) than search.
An additional benefit of using a sharing widget on our own site is the built-in analytics capability, which will allow us to see what content is being shared across our Web site.
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.
Should We Use Underscores or Hyphens in URLs?
As part of our implementation of Ingeniux CMS, we’ve had to decide how we want URLs to read (i.e., how will the page name read in a browser’s address bar).
Out of the box, Ingeniux displays page URLs as numbers with an .xml extension (e.g., 345.xml). Although, this method is short and clean, numbers aren’t real memorable. It’s much easier for site visitors to remember academics.html or news.html than 345.xml. You have some inclination where academics.html will take you when clicked, whereas 345.xml is pretty vague.
To present more human-readable URLs, Ingeniux allows us to utilize structured URLs using a hyphen or an underscore as a separator and specify .htm or .html as an extension. So which is better, hyphens or underscores? For me it has always come down to usability, something we touch on during each CMS training. It is much easier to read a Web address done in hyphens than underscores, especially when including URLs in print. If URLs appear as underlined text, the underscores are often harder to read.
When it comes down to it, search engines treat both underscores and hyphens differently. Google for example treats hyphens as separators or dividers while underscores are not treated as such as shown below.
Underscores vs. Hyphens
Example 1: www.anselm.edu/my_web_page.html
Example 2: www.anselm.edu/my-web-page.html
How Google reads these URLs.
Example 1: mywebpage
Example 2: my web page
Changes Regarding Web Site Update Requests
Early this week the campus was notified via an all-campus e-mail that the Web staff would be “unable to take on any new Web projects from November though January” given that we are in the home stretch of the redesign project.
We will continue to perform Web updates on the site that are important or critical to the business of the college. But we will push off those updates that are of a less critical nature so we can focus our full attention on the new Web site.
This is by no means an odd thing. Michael Stoner (mStoner) wrote a great post on his blog this week entitled “Timing is Everything,” which offers some insight into the amount of time it can take to redesign or redevelop a college Web site. It’s a good read and offers some details on the experiences of a few colleges that have gone through recent redesigns. And just to reference one sentence in his post, Saint Anselm is “redeveloping” its Web site (its much more than a redesign). We are deploying new CMS technology, introducing new functionality and content, and redesigning the look and feel of our site. So our project time frame has been on the longer side.
A New and Improved Search Engine
One of the most requested new Web site features we heard from faculty, staff, and students during our redesign discovery process was improved search. To paraphrase some of the comments we heard – “when I search the college site I get a bunch of results that have nothing to do with what I’m searching for.”
So one of the priorities of the redesign project was to improve site search. So after looking at several different options, we purchased a Google Mini search appliance, which arrived in the mail this week from Google.
Introducing “Faces of Saint Anselm”
BarkleyREI has designed an engaging Flash piece that will be used in the right sidebar of the redesigned Web site to present profiles of current students, faculty, and alumni across the site. Internally, we’ve been calling it “Faces” for some time now. We think BarkleyREI has done a great job in designing this particular Flash application and we are looking forward to using it as it will allow us to display profiles in a new and more interactive way.
Faces Overview
As described above, the “Faces” Flash piece will live within the right sidebar of select pages throughout the site. When clicked on, an overlay will open above the page. Each profile will include name, class year, major, a short text profile, and “Dig Deeper” links, which will link people to relevant Web pages within the Saint Anselm Web site. Each profile will include either a photo gallery of images (relevant to the person profiled) or a single video or audio/photo slide show.
Ingeniux CMS Training in Seattle
I spent all of last week in Seattle attending CMS training at Ingeniux’s offices. It was time very well spent.
I came away from the week of training even more impressed with Ingeniux, especially it’s flexibility and robustness as a CMS. The first day we covered all of Ingeniux’s terminology and their use – site controls, components, page types, navigation types (taxonomy vs. standard navigation), among others. We covered workflow and permissions as well as the underlying technology that powers Ingeniux – XML, XSLT (stylesheets), and schemas. It was a lot to pack into five days.