Changes Announced Regarding Content Organization and Site Publishing Timeframes
The following e-mail was sent to all Saint Anselm College faculty and staff on April 26, 2010.
If you are like most people, you’d rather do almost anything than read a long e-mail with more information about the new Web site. We know that, but even so, we’re asking you to please read this one. It deals with important changes in how the content on the new Web site is organized and some tweaks in the publishing process. Your willingness to read these updates as we send them will minimize some confusion when we take the new site live, a time when we will be less able to answer your immediate questions or concerns.
Change in How Content is Organized on the New Web Site
One thing we heard repeatedly from our Web firm as well as other firms that had bid on our redesign project, is how the college’s current Web site architecture (site navigation) was very compartmentalized in its organization, meaning that it was organized according to how the college is set up rather than how the average visitor seeks information while navigating the site. For example, in the current site, visitors must visit a particular administrative or academic department to get information and must have some level of knowledge about what that department does in order to know where to go. While this works relatively well for our own faculty and staff, it is quite confusing to prospective students and their families who are less well versed in the vernacular of higher education.
The new Web site’s architecture (how content is organized or housed) has changed and will be driven by best practices and proven strategies in how users interface with our site. In most instances, the content is the same, but it may be located in a different place or in multiple places when the information is of interest to more than one segment of our audience. The one exception to this is academic departments, which will continue to be organized as they are on the current site, but can be found with fewer clicks. A new header of “majors,” which is the word choice used by prospective students, is given more prominence in the new site.
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
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.
Web Usability Testing of Current and Prospective Students
This week we are conducting Web usability testing on the new site design with current and prospective students. We had two people from BarkleyREI on campus on Tuesday to test the new site with current students and we are testing prospective students at BarkleyREI’s headquarters in Pittsburgh throughout the week.
Before I get into it, I suppose I should explain what usability testing is and why we are doing it (and why it is really important). Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen describes usability testing as “a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. The word “usability” also refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process.”
The aim of our usability testing is to evaluate the new Web site design and information architecture with end users. Up until this point we’ve followed industry best practices in developing our site strategy, the site’s information architecture, and in designing the user interface for the site. So each step of the way we’ve made numerous assumptions and usability testing allows use to get direct input on how real users of the site think and respond to the design, content, and how we’ve organized the site. Does the site meet it’s intended purposes, what is its ease of use (in particular sections or as a whole), are users in each group able to complete expected site tasks, are we seeing any trends from one user test to the next.
Level Page Design Comps
Since the approval of the new home page design, we’ve been working with BarkleyREI on designs for lower level page templates. You will see several recognizable design elements that are being carried over from the new college home page design — the color palette, the blue page background gradient, header and global navigation, and the super footer.
Please keep in mind that the photos used in these design comps are only placeholders as is the Latin text used for filler. Also, we’ve overfilled the right sidebar to show multiple options available for displaying column call outs.
At this stage, BarkleyREI presented us with two unique design approaches for the level page templates. One design saw the color red introduced to the color palette (the same red used on the current site). After seeking feedback from several offices, we decided that the introduction of red to the color palette was a sharp departure from the color palette used for the new home page. So we have stayed with a mostly blue color palette in the level page designs.