and CMS migration
As this will be the last post before Winter Break and the end of 2018, let’s take a look back over the last several months. Pour yourself a virtual toddy, throw a log on the fire and reflect on what has been accomplished.
Website Refresh: We have refreshed content, revitalized pages and transformed sites across the student-facing galaxy this fall. By the time you read this, these pages will be showing off their fresh new look and feel: [Read more…]
In order to form a more perfect website, the UTC web team and colleagues from across campus, including the Library and Information Technology, will be participating in a series of training workshops.
Lee Walker, a local Drupal expert with Code Journeymen, kicks off the workshops this week, Dec. 10-14. Lee’s workshops are intended for those with technical skill sets and who will be supporting the Drupal content migration and managing the system and coding environments.
It’s called Scope Creep. It happens when someone says ‘we need a new dishwasher’ and seven months later, after walls have been removed, new cabinets have been set in place and new appliances hooked up, that you realize the $900 dishwasher cost way more and took a lot more time. Classic scope creep!
Most project managers recognize scope creep is happening when someone says, ‘Well, while we’re doing this anyway, let’s <fill in the blank>.’
Time to assess progress and celebrate accomplishments! I started working with the UTC Communications and Marketing team in mid-September to provide project management for the Drupal migration. As projects often layout, a few other tasks have crept into the initial plan, but I’d like everyone to recognize what has been accomplished in summary form:
Birds definitely do it. Bees and educated fleas might do it.
I can surely state that data definitely…migrates. In that old song the metaphor referred more to falling in love than moving software and data around, but the concept of migration applies. Software and data don’t fly south for the winter, but they can fly to another location and those in information technology refer to this as a ‘migration.’
Do you remember playing the Telephone Game as a child?
It’s the game where someone whispers a story to the next person and the whispering continues around the circle until the final ‘receiver’ relays the message to the entire group. Most of the time, this is followed by laughter as the story details have changed dramatically with each new receiver on the other end of the telephone line. The grapevine or the water cooler can be metaphors for the Telephone Game played out in adult conversations.
Hope is not a plan.
I hope it doesn’t rain today, but I plan to take my umbrella just in case.
At the heart of project management is a hope or dream that, whatever the outcome, it will be positive and timely. The larger the project (dictated by number of people involved, amount of time needed to complete the project or general complexity of achieving the project goal), the more “project management” is needed.
Millions of projects are undertaken each year with little more than the final goal in mind. Many of those will reach the goal with little more than an Excel spreadsheet of tasks and a person with the drive to see the mission accomplished.
Similar to Cajun cooking, where the common understanding is that first you make a roux, before we can migrate to a new CMS, we need to make an inventory.
Simply moving out-of-date content or pages that aren’t working properly would lead to prolonged clean-up in the long run. The website refresh phase of improvement to utc.edu focuses on the clean-up and reorganization of existing content.
To begin the process, we are starting with sites that focus most heavily on students.
Everything you see on any given website could be considered “content.”
From text to headers and footers, article titles, images, tags, tabs, comment boxes, links to other pages, boxes, calendars, charts and graphs—every piece of information has a unique placement to create the overall design of the page. A content management system, or CMS, is behind all of it, facilitating placement through the creation of templates.
It has been five years since the last redesign and content management system for the University’s website was upgraded. UTC.edu is overdue for improvement.
The improvements will take several months but result in a much better-functioning site; for example: