We’ve had our heads down the last month with the web makeover project, and are taking a moment to let the community know where things stand, and when we will finally launch the new Middlebury website. In the last month, we have trained over 200 staff and faculty in the new web content management system Drupal that powers the new website, and this small army has converted nearly all of their old websites to the new format. We’ve programmed interfaces to allow for the various department, offices, and programs across the College to maintain this information, and we’ve created feeds from our various administrative systems to allow much of the website to remain up-to-date by subscribing to the authoritative information in these systems. Unlike many schools who have chosen to re-design their websites incrementally, we’ve chosen to do a wholesale replacement of the old site with a brand-new site. This is much more work up front, but we believe it is the right approach, since the site will be much more cohesive and we won’t be mired in website conversion efforts once we have completed this one big push.

We are getting very, very close to being able to launch the new site. We have to finalize some designs and programming, and then do some final testing and clean-up work. Depending on how good our estimates are, you can expect to see the new site up and running in early February. Part of what we’ll be doing between now and then is testing the new site, and so you may hear again from us asking for help in identifying bugs, broken links, formatting problems, and other issues that inevitably crop up when one moves an entire website to a new platform. (For those who want a sneak peek at the site, you can see it on campus at http://midd2.middlebury.edu and from off-campus at http://ezproxy.middlebury.edu/login?url=midd2.middlebury.edu

You may want to look at some of the following examples of new sites that we think are particularly good:

http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/physics

http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/chem
http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/geol

http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/lib/research/research_instr

http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/resources/visual
http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/resources/ctlr
http://midd2.middlebury.edu/academics/physics/facilities/obs

We look forward to finishing up this project so that we can move on to the exciting list of great projects that we have been ignoring in order to move us to this new platform. If you have any questions or comments, please use the comment feature below.