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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. At the top of each Microsoft Word document, include the following sections:
   1. CONTACT: Person to contact if we have questions regarding the content changes.
   2. DATE OF CONTENT CHANGE: The date of the change (e.g., Date of Content Change: 1/13/09)
   3. NOTES: A notes section that describes the changes made to the page (please be brief)
   4. PAGE URL: The current URL of the page in the CMS
   5. 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.)
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.

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.

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

Given the Web’s capacity to evolve, this could easy change at any time. But based on our current understanding, we will be utilizing hyphens as separators for the redesigned site for improved search engine optimization (SEO) and readability.

Sites Referencing the use of Underscores vs. Hyphens

• http://www.tunnel7.com/blog/article/hyphens-or-underscores
• http://pixelposition.com/hyphens-underscores
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k (Google software engineer Matt Cutts)

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.

Up until this point, we have been managing two Web sites – the current live Web site and working on the new Web site. Over the next few months we need to migrate thousands of pages of content from our current CMS into our new one. This includes writing nearly a thousand new pages of content, writing profiles, selecting photography, callouts, and other new features to accompany Web pages, and shooting new photography for new sections like “Faces of Saint Anselm.” Did a mention QA testing and fixing bugs?

The volume of work to complete is often daunting and monotonous at times and we are looking forward to the launch of the redesigned site. With that said, even after launch much work will continue on the new site, including adding additional content and new features, and training faculty and staff on the new CMS — something that will require the Web staff to create a whole new set of training documentation and schedule many training sessions.

We are really excited about the look and feel of the new site and its additional features and look forward to the launch of the new site in early 2010.

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.

The Google Mini will provide us with everything we currently get with Google search (including a familiar interface), but will provide us with more control over site search as well as more detailed reporting as noted below.

• Additional Reporting
  More detailed reports on what content the Mini’s crawler has indexed and will index, as well as errors that the Mini found when crawling our site. Also, more detailed reports on what visitors are searching for on our site.
• Site Indexing
  We can specify which pages or sections of our site are crawled and indexed to show up in search results or not indexed. We can also specify the frequency at which pages on our site are crawled.
• Google Analytics Integration
  Better understand how visitors are using our public Web site and improve the effectiveness of our search results.
• Keyword
  Allows us to specify keywords that return specific results when someone searches our site. For example, if someone searches for Dining on our site, we can associate that keyword with Dining Services and the URL for their site (rather than getting a top search result pointing to an academic paper on how to eat healthy when dining out). So whenever someone searches for Dining the link will appear at the top of the search no matter where it would normally appear in the result set.
• Synonyms
  Synonyms will give alternate terms for your search. For example, when a visitor searches for “Academic Minors” we can add suggestions, e.g., “Academic Certificates,” to the result set.
• Document Types
  The Google Mini, like our current Google search, will search for multiple document types and display the document types in the results. The Mini can search more than 220 file types, including html, aspx, php, pdf, office documents, etc.

Since 2002, the college has been using Google’s free custom search engine (formerly Google University Search). It’s used by many colleges and universities since it’s free and search results can be served up without displaying ads. However, since it’s free, it lacks a lot of the more robust features sought by institutions. Features you typically find with a paid search engine, like enhanced reporting, keywords, synonyms, setting site crawl frequency, etc.

We will continue to use Google Custom Search, but only as a back up to our Google Mini appliance should it go down (knock on wood). Once the Mini is installed, we’ll then need to configure the Mini to output results within our new CMS templates, which is something we will be working on in early December.

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.

Profile content will be managed within the Ingeniux CMS via XML to allow for easy updating and the addition of new profiles. This will also allow us to display a Flash alternative version of this site feature.

We’ve also asked BarkleyREI to allow us to use a basic taxonomy with the “Faces” piece that will permit us to display and sort the profiles by major so we can include them on academic major pages to highlight current students and faculty as well as alumni outcomes.

We’ve planned for three two “engagement” Flash pieces to be used on the redesigned site – “the Wall” gallery which will be featured on the college home page, a virtual tour, and “Faces.” Additionally, we’ve allowed for the right column of the CMS to be used for displaying Flickr photo RSS feeds, embedded YouTube videos, photo galleries, and related links (links to content related to the page being displayed).

Update 11/25/09: Given budget constraints and the large volume of work remaining on the redesign project, we’ve decided to push the development of the virtual tour off to phase two of the project.

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.

The biggest thing I came away with was the need and importance of proper planning at the beginning of the project even before we build out our site. Something that Ingeniux emphasized at every turn.

We spent the last day building out our site specifications document, which details how different site elements will be used in Ingeniux. We still have to finish the spec and review with Ingeniux as we only got as far as 3-4 page types (we’ll likely be in the range of 20 page types when all is finished).

The site spec documents what will be reused throughout the site, what elements will only be required in certain pages or sections, e.g., audience gateway pages. The site specifications document is used to clearly articulate all of this information, including site-wide conventions and in turn is used to build out our site schemas. For example, a site will typically reuse multiple elements site-wide like a body copy tag, page title, abstract or short description, page images, related links, contact information, header, footer, photo gallery feature, video player, flash elements, callouts, breadcrumb navigation, among others. We specify all of this in the site spec so we can plan for the efficient reuse of many different site elements.

Once the site specifications document is finalized, it is at the point we begin building out the many different page types by building out our schemas and stylesheets (XSLT). Once they are built out we then can begin filling the site with content.

We’ll next see someone from Ingeniux in late November or early December when we have a trainer on campus to assist us in setting up site permissions and workflows and to provide site administrator training.