On July 12, WSU launched a website redesign that holds tremendous promise for the university in supporting our enrollment and marketing efforts. Concurrent with the new design, we also launched a new content management system (CMS) and a new interactive campus map and virtual tour platform. This complex project involved the migration of roughly 15,000 pages of content from our old site, pages which were generated by an unsustainable and unsupported 15-year-old content management system called Department Tools (DT).
The top portion of the site, which was built natively in the new CMS, is dynamic, and tells WSU's story and supports our brand with much more sophisticated features, imagery and video than our former site. Unfortunately, the initial quality of the migration of pre-existing pages from the Department Tools system caused serious issues for some of our users across campus, including file name confusion and broken links.
The core collaboration group, comprising staff from Strategic Communications, the Media Resources Center and Information Technology Services, is working hard to mitigate problems through continuous support, training and intervention efforts to elevate the quality and functionality of all WSU sites. Further, the content management system offers additional, built-in support including user forums, scheduled and on-demand video trainings, FAQs and glossaries. With every day and every training, the more than 300 website contributors across our campus gain speed and confidence as they work in the new CMS.
Among the efforts we've undertaken include a Web Support site (wichita.edu/websupport) that allows users to quickly start a ticket on any website-related problem they may be encountering. The turnaround time on support tickets averages just a few hours. Strategic Communications is posting website updates daily in WSU Today to keep users informed of progress and training opportunities and to offer tips and links to WSU produced on-demand video resources.
It's important to note that the same tools used to build the top portion of the site are now in the hands of our content creators all across campus. In time we will have a site that is accessible, powerful and beautiful from top to bottom.
There were several factors that informed our decision to launch on July 12. Those factors were:
- The need to launch during the summer to ensure that users had time to work on their sites before the start of school.
- The crucial need to minimize the university's exposure by retiring Deparment Tools, an unsupported, unsustainable 15-year-old content management system.
- The need to honor an extension granted us by the National Federation for the Blind. Our voluntary agreement with the NFB initially required a June 30 launch of a new website and content management system with tools that will allow us to make the entire site accessible over time.
The website is supported by a collaboration involving Strategic Communications, Media Resources Center and Information Technology Services. Broadly speaking, Strategic Communications holds primary responsibility for the overall project and for marketing and content; the MRC handles training, support and CMS maintenance; and ITS handles server-side functions. There is considerable crossover, however, with all areas heavily involved in support and training during this triage and optimization period.
If you need assistance with your site, go to wichita.edu/websupport to file a support ticket and see training and support information.
The redesign and launch have been communicated through WSU Today and through internal channels for nearly a year, as well as in a WSU Media Briefing one week before the actual launch. Strategic Communications met individually with deans from each college and with departments related to key admissions functions several months prior to launch to gather information about the content needs for front pages and to outline what to expect.
While we communicated as much as possible, we believe that some Department Tools users were not included in our direct communications due to the account-based structure of DT. With a single account ID and password that was often distributed to multiple users, DT made it impossible to know who was working on the site.
Strategic Communications worked with New City, an award-winning university web design firm from Blacksburg, Virginia. New City's design team visited campus for several days last summer, meeting with more than 100 members of the WSU community as part of their discovery phase. Interactions included design preference and subject matter group exercises that involved current and prospective students and their parents, faculty, staff and administrators. The group also took extensive tours of Wichita, the WSU campus and its campus expansion and examined admissions functions and print collateral. From those meetings, sets of possible thematic design elements were developed and assessed by Strategic Communications and other stakeholders before settling on a final design direction.
The information on this page is accurate as of August 6, 2018. Comment on this topic.