and CMS 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Simply moving out-of-date content or pages that aren’t working properly would lead to prolonged clean-up in the long run.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: