Website Launch Successful

Thanks to all who have shared feedback—the good, the bad and the ugly—on the college’s new website. The process went as planned. Matt Gagliardi, the technical lead for the project, has done—and continues to do—fantastic work. OIT was prepared yesterday to support the launch. Northern Commerce, the college’s web development partner, noted nothing especially out of the ordinary.

I hope you feel as I do that this is a win for the college. However, websites are never finished. Here’s a list of upcoming tasks, beyond the normal, expected requests to fix this and that.

• The new calendar function, LiveWhale, still needs some polish. We plan for LiveWhale to succeed another calendar, called Time.ly, by the end of March when the college’s contract with Time.ly expires. This will create a user training need that we are preparing to address.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) makes pages easier to find. We need to create SEO information at the page level. Given the number of pages on the site—far fewer than the 1,600+ of the old site, but still quite a few—this will take some time.
• We will identify and delete derelict and abandoned pages and media library files. There are thousands of these, especially in the media library.
• Distribution of editorial responsibility was in place on the last website and will continue. While it’s useful and contemporary for many units to be responsible for their online content, the need for an administrative function to ensure best practices, adherence to the brand, etc., exists, too. We will need to establish the balance between these two things. This will create a user training need that we already have begun to address.
• Site taxonomy needs attention. We began addressing this by combining some pages before launch, but there’s much more work to be done to create a logical site hierarchy and streamline navigation. This process will require a broader conversation and may end up noticeably rearranging things.

We took a big step forward yesterday. Let’s continue to push our website forward.