Author Archives: Michael Roy

(Almost) Hello World!

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.

The Glass Window of Feedback

We’re entering a frantic phase of the web makeover process where each week we will be receiving sets of designs from our design partner, and quickly reviewing them, making suggestions, and ultimately approving them. Throughout this project, we have tried to be as inclusive and transparent as we possibly can, in the belief that by including the community in the process, the end result will be better. At this stage, we have to shift this approach somewhat in order to move the process along at a reasonable pace. To that end, we will continue to post proposed designs to the project blog, and to be open to comments on those designs. We will however only offer very short windows where feedback can be incorporated into our feedback to our design firm, and in some cases, we may only have time to read and react to feedback after the designs have been approved. In those cases, we may be able to tweak the approved designs as we convert those designs into actual web pages. We liken this process to what you may have observed at a TV show or at the Ben & Jerry Ice Cream Factory.  There is a glass wall where you can see what’s going on, but your voice in the process is muffled by the glass wall that allows the TV show or the ice cream makers to do their work without interruption or distraction. A central tenet of our project has been that getting the new site launched on a new web authoring platform is the beginning, not the end, and so while we are somewhat dismayed that our ambitious schedule is forcing us to be slightly less inclusive during this phase, we also find solace in knowing that the site will continue to grow and evolve to meet the needs of our community.

Web Makeover Update

We are writing to give you an update on where things stand with the web makeover project.

We are still on-schedule for a January launch of the new Web site. To get there, here’s what we’re doing this summer.

1. We are putting together a list of Web sites that need to be converted, and identifying the people in charge of those Web sites in order to connect them with a project manager from the project team who will guide them through the process of converting their site to the new platform. To support this process, we are also planning a series of workshops, training sessions, and work sessions. We are also developing a workbook that will help explain the process. The list of sites that we know need converting, and our understanding of who the contact person for that site is, can be found here. If you have a Web site that isn’t on that list, please let us know by sending email to jantonio@middlebury.edu.

2. Our design firm White Whale will share with us their designs for the new site on July 23rd, at McCullough Hall, 1pm.  If you aren’t on campus, we will be providing instructions to view the presentation online.  In addition, we’ll be posting links to these designs on the makeover blog. (For those who might be interested, you can see the preliminary designs for the Monterey Institute for International Studies).

We will need your help on both these efforts. For the Web site conversion, we’ll need each office, department, program, and group that maintains a Web site to carve out time in the coming months to think about their Web site and what they want to do to improve it. For the review of the designs, we very much welcome input from the community about the designs that White Whale provides us. It’s our Web site, and while we won’t all agree on the final design, we want to have an inclusive, rigorous, and thoughtful conversation about the ideas proposed.

Best wishes,

Mike Roy, on behalf of the Web Makeover Team

On-line directory desiderata

The College is going to stop printing the directory, beginning this Fall. We are doing so for obvious reasons: to save money, to save considerable staff time (a form of money), and to lower our carbon footprint. In conversations leading up to this decision, many people had many very fond things to say about the printed directory, and will mourn this loss. As we head into the design phase of the web makeover project, this seems like a great opportunity to try to understand exactly what is it about the printed directory that is superior to the on-line directory, since we will be modifying the on-line directory as part of the overall makeover.

Here’s what we’ve heard so far about what the print directory does better than the on-line directory

  1. It allows you to quickly scan through the staff of a department to figure out who is responsible for what, and provides general contact information for a department.
  2. It allows you to easily find someone’s home phone number, unlike the online directory where home phone numbers are only viewable if the person wants to show them and has taken the extra step to set their configuration on the Change Information form.
  3. It allows you to look up the hometown for a student.
  4. It allows you to look up the on-campus address for a student.
  5. It identifies the chair and academic coordinator for each academic department.
  6. It allows you to limit your search to just students, or just faculty/staff.
  7. It can be used when you aren’t near a computer.

This is just a preliminary list of issues that a new design would need to address; we are posting this as a means of encouraging those of you who worry about the loss of the printed directory to let us know what we can do to make the on-line directory as good, or even better!, than the printed directory. Please use the comments on this post to record your thoughts. (And include examples of other great directories if you happen to know of them.)

Update to Web Makeover

Recently we had our web makeover design partner White Whale Web Services in town, and with this visit, the next phase of our project has begun. We thought it would be useful to let you all know what to expect in the next four months. Here is a list of things we know we’ll be doing, who will be doing them, and roughly when they’ll be happening:

Activity One: Strategic Recommendations Document
White Whale will be writing up a strategic recommendation document that will summarize their findings from their visit, their analysis of the work that we’ve done to date (surveys, focus groups, stakeholder reports, blog comments, etc.), and make some strategic recommendations about the direction they intend to take with this project. We’ll get this document from them in mid-May and we’ll have until early June to respond to their ideas. We will post this document for all to read and react to, and hold open sessions for further conversation.

Activity Two: Content Review
White Whale will be doing an extensive content review of our site, and make recommendations about how we might approach re-writing and representing our existing materials in a more web native fashion. We’ll be sharing this review with the relevant stakeholders as they begin making plans for how to re-fashion their websites.

Activity Three: Workbook for Site Conversion
White Whale will also be working with us to develop a workbook to help stakeholders prepare for website conversion. This will include activities for doing page inventories, for picking components (e.g. calendar, staff listings, etc.) for inclusion on the site, and for thinking about the quantity and placement of text, graphics, and links on a page that we will use as we begin to work on developing site conversion plans.

Activity Four: Graphics Standards
In early June, White Whale will provide us with initial plans for stylesheet for the common elements of the website, i.e content and column widths, fonts for plaintext and headers, and a simple color pallette.
Activity Five: Information Architecture and Design
White Whale will be delivering an information architecture and design for our site in mid-July. This design will serve as the template for the design of the home page, and all of the websites linked to from the home page. We will have two weeks to provide feedback, and will work to finalize the design direction by the first week of August.

Activity Six: Training and Conversion
By early June, we will have a team and process in place to help departments and individuals convert their sites to the new design and the new web authoring tool Drupal. We anticipate that this process will begin in early August, and continue on through the fall, with the goal of completing the conversion in time for Middlebury’s soft launch in mid-December.

Activity Seven: New or Revised Web Applications
As part of this project, we are creating new or substantially revising a host of web applications that will be integrated into the new design. These include:

  1. Revised event calendar
  2. Interactive course catalog
  3. Useful forms database
  4. Improved search technology
  5. Single Sign-on
  6. Personalized Homepages

Activity Eight: Gathering Middlebury Stories
One important insight from White Whale’s visit was that Middlebury has a tremendous range of vibrant activities, events, accomplishments and personalities that our current website does not adequately capture. To build content for our new site, we will be collecting Middlebury Stories from faculty, students, staff, alumni, and other members of the Middlebury community. In May, we will launch a web tool to gather stories from the community, and work to feature this content dynamically on our new website. We hope everyone involved in Middlebury will share their stories! See https://sites.middlebury.edu/webredo/stories/ to share your story.

Stay Connected over the Summer!

We remain committed to keeping the Middlebury Community involved in this process throughout; since many will be away on summer vacation, we plan to ramp up our reliance on technology to provide opportunities for input, feedback, suggestions, and shouts of encouragement.

These include:

  1. the project blog (http://go.middlebury.edu/webmakeover) (Note: you can now sign up to have updates to the blog delivered to your inbox for those who don’t use RSS.)
  2. a Middlebury webmakeover facebook group (http://go.middlebury.edu/webmakeover?fb)
  3. a twitter feed: http://twitter.com/webredo

While we recognize that there are many, many other things taking place on and off campus that are calling for your attention, we hope that you will find time to involve yourself in this process. We remain committed to creating a website that reflects the values of Middlebury and is a powerful tool for our efforts to communicate and get our work done in an increasingly interconnected, increasingly global institution. The only way we’ll get there is with your help!

Summary of Key Dates

mid May: strategic document review
early June: graphic standars
mid June: new MIIS designs
mid July: new Middlebury designs and information architecture
mid August: MIIS site beta launch
mid December: Middlebury site beta launch

Middlebury and Monterey select White Whale as Web makeover partner

We are pleased to announce that we have chosen White Whale Web Services (http://whitewhale.net/) of Oakland, California, to be our design and information architecture partner for the Middlebury Web makeover project. We believe White Whale has the right combination of skills, experience and vision to meet our demanding requirements. Their process and resulting products have proven to be creative, user-centric, and highly customized to meet the unique needs of the institutions they work with.

We came to this decision through an open, collaborative process that included input from all those who attended the open vendor presentations both in-person and via webcast in Monterey. We are committed to continuing this transparency as we move into the next phase of the project. And we are certain that our new partners will bring fresh ideas to further engage the broad Middlebury community in the process of reinventing our website.

We are working quickly to map out the next phase of our project and are still committed to our aggressive timeline. Stay tuned as we will be in touch soon to talk about what comes next. And all of us really appreciate the useful feedback that many of you provided to us. I know that we have many challenges ahead of us as we move into this phase, and many unanswered questions. Rest assured that there will be ample opportunity to talk through these challenges, and that we will do all that we can to ensure that the project has the resources it needs to succeed.

Save the dates: White Whale’s full Web team will make its first visit to Monterey on April 2, and will be on the Middlebury campus April 27-29. More information on the schedule to come soon. 

Best wishes,

Mike Roy
Dean of Library and Information Services
on behalf of the Web makeover coordinating committee
https://sites.middlebury.edu/webredo/

 

Update on Makeover: 4 March 2009

I thought it would be helpful to give a summary of where things stand with the web makeover project, and what is going to happen in the upcoming weeks and months.

Drupal chosen as content management system
After a thorough review of commercial and open-source options for the now defunct Microsoft Content Management System, we have chose Drupal to be the main content management system for Middlebury. In addition, we will be developing a framework that will allow for members of the community to create their own customized versions of the Middlebury website.

Proposals are in from our RFP
We’ve received 18 proposals from vendors and the coordinating group is currently reading these proposals. We plan to select 3 (or 4) finalists who we will invite to campus to present their ideas to us. We will host campus-wide presentations and provide a forum for accepting feedback from the community on these finalists.

Once we’ve selected our vendor, we will work with them to develop a project plan. That plan will involve a thorough review of the information that we’ve collected to date (stakeholder reports, survey results, focus group results), our draft information architecture, and our plans for deploying drupal, and the customized framework.

The project plan will require input from the community in the following ways:

  • clarification of requirements that we gathered initially
  • testing and finalizing the information architecture
  • feedback on prototype designs and layouts of pages and sites
  • participation in usability testing

We expect that this work will begin in late March or early April.

In addition, we will be developing plans for conversion of our existing content to this new platform and environment. This will also require input and help from the community. Specifically, we will be:

  • training trainers who in turn will be training content providers on the new system
  • working closely with departments to develop conversion plans, including re-envisioning what information is available via a department website, and whenever possible, providing data from institutional databases to make that process more sustainable.

While we don’t yet have a specific timetable in place, we have ambitious goals of getting the MIIS site live in late August, and the new middlebury.edu site live in a beta form during the fall, with an official launch in early January of 2010. Below is a rough overview of our present thinking on the timeline:

This has been a wonderful project to work on so far. We are excited to be on the verge of the next phase. Please use the comment feature of this post to pose any questions that you might have.

— mike