Redirects

After my presentation today, Tanya Sloan (CAS Alumni) asked a great question:

“I have one question, about the URLs; are they staying the same? For example, we have our Golden Reunion June 12-14, and the URL for that is http://www.lclark.edu/dept/alumni/1959.html. Will that address stay the same, and only the content will move over? Or will that change? If any pages move to new URLs, will people be automatically redirected or will we have to have a little thing that says ‘This page has moved and now lives here?’”

The quick answer here is that we'll have redirects (without a stop in between to tell the user) from the old to the new. They be a specific type of redirect called a permanent redirect so that when search engines find them, they'll reassign their references from the old to the new address and over time, we'll remove the redirects. Specific to your address above, if I were to guess, the new address would be something like: http://college.lclark.edu/alumni/reunions/golden/1959/ -or, since they are the same- http://www.lclark.edu/college/alumni/reunions/golden/1959/ Don't depend on the above addresses as they could end up different once both you and we get into your site to migrate/reorganize it. Another big difference you'll note in the addresses above — LiveWhale allows for multiple folder levels within your site.

said via whiteboardover 1 year agoand tagged with redesign, implementation, address, alumni, migration, redirect, uri, url, and media.lclark.edu

Our launch date is June 8.

So how do you choose a launch date? I don’t know of any science to this. In my mind, the best thing you can do is adopt a pragmatic approach, so that’s what we did. Between Jason and Tonya from White Whale and Morgan, Gwyn, and, we simply assembled around a table in the Trail Room and while eating our lunch, picked the day in about five minutes. Had you been at an adjacent table, and in the mind to listen in on our incredibly interesting conversation which often dwells upon the nuances of code, scripting and servers, this is how those five minutes went. We started with some major dates and events. The admissions cycles finish up in/around May, at least for CAS and Law since Grad runs continuously, and the commencements run from mid-May to June 7. So we would either need to be well before or after the May to early June window. Then, there’s the consideration of how much time we need to complete the tasks needed for launch. There is a lot on the plate, since the back-end of the site is being completely replaced along with the design and content we all see on the front. With only threeish months to late March or early April, we decided it was too soon, so launch would have to be post June 7. And what about day of the week? I wanted it to be early in the week, so that we’d have the rest of the week to dig through broken apps, bugs, links and the like. I personally feel that no site launch is perfect or you took too long doing it and regardless, even if it is perfect, you should plan time to handle issues that arise. So that meant we’d launch on a Monday. Since there was no reason to delay longer than June 8, that’s what it became.... 4:58, 4:59, 5:00. (And we’re off...)

said via whiteboardover 1 year agoand tagged with redesign, implementation, planning, white whale, kick-off, launch date, meeting, and media.lclark.edu

Summer ’08 to Winter ’09

[This post is part of a series. Read the first post.] As you may have already read in our posts from last summer on the results of the strategy phase, we have a visual design for the institutional and school home pages, navigation and structure for the site as a whole (that removes the “dead-ends” that you can get stuck in jumping from school-to-school), and offers some new opportunities to create community through apps like The Green. There was a lot to digest from the strategy phase, so we stepped back from the designs and settled in to the process of preparing for the implementation. Needless to say, when you plan to replace your content management system (CMS), re-organize huge amounts of content, rewrite other major segments of the site, and produce a new series of personal stories about LC people (“Uncommon Journeys”) that will be front and center on the new site, you have a bit to do. Clearly, if we wanted to do this all ourselves, it would probably take something close to several years for New Media alone to complete it, especially if we were to keep most of our other existing projects afloat. That time-line, simply put, was too long. The web and other forms of electronic communication are a major factor in our strategic marketing for the institution as a whole, and the changes needed faster attention. So we proposed to the President’s Strategic Initiatives Fund that we re-hire White Whale, the small web consulting firm with which we worked closely during the strategy phase, to join us on this adventure and help us remake the site. The Executive Council agreed with us, and we set about to hire White Whale again and otherwise get some new virtual servers set up, but this would all take a little longer than I had planned.

said via whiteboardover 1 year agoand tagged with redesign, implementation, planning, presidents strategic initiatives fund, strategic marketing, strategic plan, white whale, and media.lclark.edu

Onward, Redesign!

Apologies as I have not written in some time, and there’s a lot to bring to the table today, so I may not be able to deliver it all in one post — and frankly, you probably don’t want me too either. And before I start, I have to remark on one amazing thing that we continue to note. Typically, the implementation of a web redesign is a big scary thing for people, and yet at LC, we are finding that most people on campus have some good questions to check, but after that, they — or rather, you — are ready to embark on this adventure with us. And sometimes even more than ready — in that we can’t have it ready soon enough and the beta offers have been generous. I have to say, that willingness and acceptance makes a huge difference in how successful this new website will be. So thanks to everyone — it does indeed make a difference. To say it’s hard to fit the big picture of a institution-level redesign the scale of Lewis & Clark in one’s head is a little true, at least for me, but I manage to squeeze it all in now and again, before some other piece falls out an ear. So instead, I rather think of it as a continuum — something like one of those photo sliders that allow you to scroll horizontally back and forth, focus in on the details and then pull back and glimpse the whole thing. (If you’re a Microsoft devotée, think PhotoSynth instead and you’ll get the concept.) So, I’ll do something of that over this and next few posts. Step-by-step, or rather, aspect-by-aspect — snapshot-by-snapshot — I’ll outline a number of the major elements of the redesign, and with each include where we currently are, and what’s yet to happen. But, before that, let’s start with a little background on what’s happened since the summer.

said via whiteboardover 1 year agoand tagged with redesign, implementation, planning, and media.lclark.edu