On Tuesday, June 9th, at 4pm (1pm PST), White Whale will be presenting a new design for the Monterey Institute of International Studies website. People at Middlebury can participate in the unveiling in two ways.
Join us in Library 201, where we will show the unveiling in the classroom.
–or–
Log into the Elluminate session using the instructions here: https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/wiki/MIIS/Website_Unveiling
Please join us as we take a look at the first design in the Web makeover process.
… and in the context of the Web Makeover, how does Middlebury present itself to the rest of the world on a global platform, at a time where we are re-organizing and redefining ourselves? Can the website’s homepage answer these questions?
I write with an update on Middlebury’s website makeover project, and a request for how you can participate to make our site more vibrant and effective.
In late April, our design firm White Whale visited campus and met with many of us to understand the culture of Middlebury. Through this process, we all feel confident that the new website will address the core concerns that many have voiced throughout the process: effective search, easier navigation, more design flexibility, easier to edit and update, and more multimedia possibilities.
However, White Whale discovered a problem that we had not previously diagnosed: they saw Middlebury as an incredibly vibrant place full of exciting research, activities, projects, and people – but the current site does not effectively share those stories. We realized that as a community, we are much better at doing interesting things in the classroom, labs, publishing world, and community, than sharing knowledge about what we do – and often, peers outside of Middlebury know more about what faculty, staff, and students are working on than here on campus.
The solution to this problem requires simple but widespread participation from faculty, staff, students, and alumni to help share Middlebury stories. White Whale is working on a web design that highlights the vibrancy of the Middlebury community, but we need to discover more specific stories to highlight. To help “seed” this process, we have created a simple web form designed to allow you to let the web makeover committee know what stories you have to share or type go/webstories in your browser.
White Whale has challenged us to gather 400 compelling Middlebury stories by the beginning of June – we can easily top that threshhold if each member of our community shared only 1-2 stories of your accomplishments. It will take only a few minutes to share what you already know, and it will help make our site much more reflective of who we are and what we do. All you’ll need to do is type 2-3 sentences about a project have been working on or know about – if the story seems like something that the Communications Office would like to feature in other media, they might contact you to help develop the story.
Thanks in advance for helping our website tell our stories!
We’ve created a visual timeline to describe the rest of the project for those who like visual things:
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:
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.
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:
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
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/
The Web makeover team has selected four vendors as finalists for the Web redesign project, and they’ll be in Middlebury next week, March 16-20, to make presentations. Each of the four will be here for one day. Here’s where and when they’ll be presenting:
— Tellart, http://www.tellart.com
Monday, March 16, Axinn 100
Public presentation: 10:30 a.m. to noon (1-hour presentation; 1/2-hour Q&A)
— White Whale Web Services, http://www.whitewhale.net
Wednesday, March 18, Axinn 100
Public presentation: 10:30 a.m. to noon (1-hour presentation; 1/2-hour Q&A)
— Dynamic Diagrams, http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com
Thursday, March 19, Twilight Auditorium
Public presentation: 10:30 a.m. to noon (1-hour presentation; 1/2-hour Q&A)
— decimal152, http://www.decimal152.com
Friday, March 20, Twilight Auditorium
Public presentation: 10:30 a.m. to noon (1-hour presentation; 1/2-hour Q&A)
The campus community is welcome to attend any or all of these sessions. Note that other meetings with the vendors will be held throughout each day (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) with various groups from the Web makeover team.
Questions? E-mail tetchell@middlebury.edu.
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:
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:
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
Proposals are now due in electronic form by Monday, March 2, 2009, at 5 p.m. EST. Please send proposals to Tim Etchells, director of interactive communications: tetchell@middlebury.edu. Any questions should be e-mailed to the same address.
Because of some technical difficulties in the call on Friday, 2/20, we’re scheduling an optional follow-up call on Monday, 2/23, from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. Anyone unable to get into Friday’s meeting, or who has questions still unanswered, is welcome to take part. Use the link below to register for the Web meeting and find the phone conference call information.