Revised Site Launch Date Set for Mid-May Following Final Exams (and Other Project Updates)
It’s been awhile since our last project update. I’m including below an e-mail that was sent to the college community via a campus-wide e-mail on April 9, 2010.
Since January, we have been working hard to add newly written content and migrate thousands of existing Web pages into the new content management system (CMS). In addition, the Web staff have been learning the new Ingeniux CMS, further customizing the software, and working through the many bugs that arise when rolling out new technology.
New Site Launch Date
Since the end of the academic year is quickly drawing near, we want to minimize any potential impact to faculty and current students by switching to a new system at a critical time of year. We have revised our target site launch date until mid-May following final exams. This will also allow us more time to complete our content migration and work through any remaining technical issues.
Making Updates to Existing Web Site (in the current CMS)
If you need to make important changes to content that is in the current CMS, you are free to do so. Laura Rossi and I continue to make content updates to the current live site as needed. However, if you make any content updates in the current CMS, please remember to use the process we outlined in our January project update regarding tracking those changes . This is the only way we can be sure that the changes you are making to the current site will be added to the new system. This notice does not apply to Web sites managed outside of the CMS by software like Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage.
Content Review With Departments
Since we are migrating content from dozens of administrative departments to the new site, we simply do not have the time or ability to meet with each department on an individual basis prior to the launch of the new Web site. We know that many departments are anxious to get our assistance on technical, content, and creative concerns. As soon as we have the new site live, and training completed for departmental Website managers and editors, we will be happy to assist those departments needing our help. We ask for and appreciate your patience.
Training on New Content Management System
The Web staff will begin conducting group training sessions on how to use the new CMS immediately following the launch. Training sessions will likely begin in early June and continue on an ongoing basis over the summer and fall. We will endeavor to provide as many as possible, including some evening and off-hour sessions to accommodate schedules.
Next week, we will provide you with an update on important information about the new site’s architecture and navigation (the ‘what will live where map’ and how those decisions were made). That update will also include information about the publishing process.
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.
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
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.
Home Page Wireframe, Site Map, and Content Outline
Over the course of last month and half we’ve been hard at work on several fronts with the redesign project. First, we worked with BarkleyREI to finalize the information architecture (aka site map) for the college site. We also completed the site content outline, which is a more comprehensive outline of the site’s higher level pages with detailed notes.
Lastly, we completed work on the home page wireframe, a visual representation of the home page we finish before we begin any design work. The wireframe defines what will go on the home page, including primary, secondary, and tertiary navigation, footer, call outs, search box, news and calendar listings, and multimedia features. Over the course of this work we sought and received input from several offices and have appreciated their feedback.
Overcoming Silos
Early on in our redesign project when we were selecting a Web firm, we received feedback from several companies that our Web site information architecture was strong, but was very siloed. We spend a lot of time on our current Web site directing visitors to one department or another for Web information. The thing to keep in mind is that our Web visitors should not have to learn our organizational structure to find information about us. With this in mind, we spent a lot of time developing the site’s information architecture to have it be more topic based and building stronger landing pages for the site’s target audiences – current students, parents and families, alumni, businesses and community, and faculty and staff.
It’s important to note that the primary audience for the college Web site is prospective students, an external audience that is least familiar with the college’s organizational structure and an audience where topic-based navigation is a better approach.
Next Steps
With the home page wireframe, content outline, and site map now complete, we now move on to the next project priorities:
- Home page design concepts - BarkleyREI will present us with four design concepts for review
- Lower level wireframes – defining what will be included on all landing pages and major sites linked off the college home page
- Content migration tracker – a spreadsheet tracking all content that will be migrated from the current site to the new site
- Site application inventory - an inventory of all scripts, applications, and forms that will carry over to the new site and require development or template skinning
- Ingeniux application handling - Determine which applications and functionality will be handled within the Ingeniux CMS and those that will require custom development.
We also recently installed a new CMS export tool on our Web server that will allow us to easily export all current CMS content as plain text in a directory structure. Pages in the new CMS will be coded to XHTML Transitional, so much of the formating on our current site will be stripped out to remain complaint with the new document type.
Ingeniux Selected as New Content Management System
I’m pleased to announce that we have selected Ingeniux as our new content management system (CMS). The selection comes after nearly eight weeks of work and with considerable assistance and input from our Web vendor, BarkleyREI, and the CMS Selection Group, which included staff, faculty, and student representation.
The CMS finalists were Ingeniux (based in Seattle) and Hannon Hill (based in Atlanta). Both CMSs have a strong foothold in the higher education space with hundreds of college implementations between the two companies. Both CMS companies spent a full day on campus in April where they met with the Web staff, key staff from Information Technology, and provided two-hour demos of their CMSs in front of our selection group.
We started the CMS selection process with a clear understanding of our CMS functional requirements and objectives. These were communicated early on in the Web redesign project in the original RFP and then again during the CMS selection process. Both vendors submitted full proposals, which covered in detail how they matched up against our functional requirements. Their on-site demos also addressed how each product addressed our requirements. Both Hannon Hill and Ingeniux met most of these requirements, but in the end, Ingeniux came out on top. Read more