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Building a Website One Block at a Time

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Santa was very good to me.  I received the Guggenheim Museum and the Women of NASA LEGO sets. So many little tiny pieces! However, the journey to completion will provide the most fun and probably some frustration.

Construction takes planning. The Women of NASA set has 231 pieces and the Guggenheim has 744 pieces and a 40-page guide! The first task is to sort the pieces by color and then by shape. Everything from that point starts with assembling the base and working my way up.

At the start of the UTC website work in 2018, we knew we had nearly 6,000 webpages composed of a plethora of content. Finding consistency across the sites was paramount to creating a streamlined migration.

The website refresh initiative was the impetus for organizing content into manageable pieces—and then sorting by category or type. As in LEGOs, we identified common blocks and the need for a solid platform on which the blocks will sit.

Building the UTC website in Drupal has been akin to building with LEGOs. The Web Team spent the last half of 2019 constructing the platform, building common and specialty blocks, tearing down structures that weren’t working quite right, and experimenting along the way to create an experience that will work best for all.

It wasn’t all fun, and there were points of frustration, but I’m happy to report that we have a stable platform in the Acquia Cloud on which to build. Between October and the end of December the three web developers have written 304,113 lines of code making 401 commits. So far, the content editors have created the following in Drupal:

  • 22 news articles
  • 4 landing pages
  • 2 administrative home pages
  • 6 administrative internal pages
  • 1 faculty/staff contact page
  • 1 demo home page

The student employees (our content editors) in Communications and Marketing were trained on using the Drupal editor in December. They will be working on the Office of Communications and Marketing and Office of the Chancellor sites over the next 2-3 weeks.

Towards the end of January, we will have a better idea of which sites will be done, in what order, and an estimated time period.

We are starting the new year optimistically with a plan to have the migration from OU Campus to Drupal completed by mid-2020. We hope we don’t end up with a lot of extra pieces.

And That’s a Wrap

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It finally happened. The website refresh, Phase 1 of a multi-year deep look into the UTC website, has officially closed out as a project. The refresh began in October 2018.

We chose a ‘refresh’ over ‘redesign’ as we wanted to address the following goals:

  • Accessibility of the entire site.
  • Elimination of old, outdated content and pages (also to reduce page count).
  • Responsive design regardless of audience viewing on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
  • Establish more consistency across the entire site to improve user experience.
  • Focus attention on the external audiences of the site, specifically attracting and retaining students.

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The Shortest Pencil Beats the Longest Memory

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My husband is a woodworker. He reads, plans, makes notes, makes more notes, draws pictures, creates mock-ups from cardboard, practices his ideas on leftovers, figures out the cost of materials, scouts various hardware stores, and eventually he starts the actual building of a project. I frequently tell him he has all the hallmarks of a great project manager, although his projects seldom complete on the schedule I provide!

So this weekend, in his new issue of Fine Homebuilding magazine, he points out an article on “Trading in your hammer for a clipboard.” My personal and professional life collided.

I don’t have a good analogy for the hammer, but I can say that many of those tasks listed above have happened in various forms to bring the Web Refresh project team to this point.

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And Then There Were 10

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Do you remember that feeling you had when you were on your way to your first day of school? A mix of excitement, anticipation, maybe a little fear and trepidation for the work that is to come? First days can be filled equally with mixed emotions for new employees.

Well, on the web team we have grown exponentially in the last year. First, Mike Flores joined Chris Gilligan in January and they have anchored our development work this year. And, on August 15, we increased the development team by one third. Bernardo Martinez is our newest web programmer and now part of the UTC web triumvirate.

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Sprinting to Go Live

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The finish line has been set for months.

The crowd grows anxious as the race date nears.

The race organizers wait with anticipation as the coach assures them everything is moving ahead as planned.

The racers have trained, trained and trained some more. They’ve met hurdles that seemed far too high. But through perseverance and dedication, they are nearing the starting line.

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The Fine Art of Following Up

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Nobody likes to be nagged. Whether it comes from your mom, your spouse, or your boss, it may have more to say about the nagger than the naggie.

To be a good project manager, one must find ways of following up that yield results over resentment. As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, a role of a project manager is to make sure a project completes on time, at or under budget and within scope. I also like to add a fourth element and that’s to maintain a positive, productive working relationship with all the stakeholders on a project. I’m happy if no one dies or is incarcerated as a result of a project I’ve managed!

Projects can easily get off track. Especially during summer, project participants go on vacation, take days off for holidays or generally are away from the office. Yet the project remains. So it is with our Website Refresh project.

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Be Our Guest

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If you’ve been to anything Disney, you know there’s an entire culture around visitors being treated as guests.  If you’ve shopped at Nordstrom’s or Williams-Sonoma, both hallmarks of customer service, the focus on understanding customers and making spaces inviting is paramount to what they do.  You don’t just buy a product, you have an overall experience.

With that thought in mind, the Web team is implementing a more robust way to collect your issues and requests.

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Tell Me a Story, Paint Me a Picture

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Why do you search the internet?

Maybe you’re looking for information, knowledge, news of the day. Maybe you have a goal in mind and need to find a specific answer to a question. For those who visit our UTC website, it could be to find out admissions requirements, program information in a specific college or where to pay a parking fine.

When we begin to consider who visits our website and why, the volume of people and reasons can become daunting. Between Jan. 1, 2018, and today, we’ve had 3,767,325 visits to the UTC.edu website homepage alone according to our Siteimprove analytics. That’s right—almost 4 million visits. And what brings them?

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April Showers Bring May Milestones

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Our April showers came in the way of website refresh “go-lives” with eight departments giving the green light to push their sites to production. April was, by far, our busiest month between intake meetings, site reviews and final edits.

As of the last day of April, we have managed to refresh/review 58 departmental or group sites (some with multiple subsites).

We’ve also passed the halfway point in terms of refreshed content and are sitting at 60 percent completed on the website refresh meter. How does that translate in page numbers, you ask? It puts us past the 2,500-page mark! [Read more…]

Spring Cleaning Sparks Joy

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I dedicate this post to Donny Behneman as my latest mantra has become “Does this webpage spark joy?” Or a variation, “Does this PDF spark joy?” Or “Does this photo spark joy?”

As we work our way through the UTC website, one topic in each intake meeting has to do with a review of pages that can potentially be deleted. Old, outdated content contributes, in large part, to the refresh effort. Schedules from 2014, a PDF form from 2011, a photo of a student who has long since graduated all come to light during the refresh process.

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