« Parking permit paid. Parking possible? | Main | Ice cream and environmentalism »
October 19, 2004
New website goes live
The university’s web presence, www.hamline.edu, has undergone design and software changes with the “ultimate goal of bringing the Hamline promise to the online experience,” said Assistant Vice President of Marketing and Communications Jen Thorson.
According to Harry Pontiff, the chief information officer, a new website for the university has been needed for at least five years, but the funds simply were not available.
“The price tag was astronomical. Now it can be done for half the price it would have cost three years ago,” he said.
Pontiff believes that the new website is important because “Web communication is how you build communities. It’s how you present yourself to the outside world.”
“The old site wasn’t very exceptional, and it wasn’t very personable,” said Thorson.
The new design comes courtesy of Larsen Design + Interactive, a Minneapolis-based marketing and communications firm.
According to Pontiff, Larsen polled staff and faculty to find a design that would satisfy the dissimilar campus departments and schools.
It took eight months of revisions before a navigation system was finalized, which made up the bulk of the effort that went into creating the new website.
The site will utilize a new software tool, a content management system (CMS). According to the website redesign webpage: “CMS allows for consistent interface and navigational cues and navigational cues for the entire site, while distributing its maintenance to the university units or departments via an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop website interface.”
What this means, according to Pontiff, is that individual schools and departments at the university will now be able to maintain their webpages without the need for highly technical web developers. The deans of the law and graduate schools, as well as the CLA, will be able to easily control and change the content of their individual pages, without having to go through a single “web guru.”
“Every department can have control of their piece of the puzzle,” said Pontiff.
Pontiff said the next step will involve the “grunt work” of going through the site’s 30,000-plus pages and reformatting all pages to the new design. “Somebody has to make a decision to keep it or throw it out.”
The Web Implementation Team, made up of the former web gurus for different university departments and led by Desta Collier, assistant director of admissions, will be responsible for making these decisions.
Pontiff predicts the process will take at least one year.
Posted by msveum at October 19, 2004 11:28 AM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)