Website URL
Problem
The college relations office needed content management system where they could publish press releases and other news and stories on their own. They also wanted to make it easier for people to share news stories using social media. Prior to this project, content was updated manually in html and using FTP.
Solution
I designed website that felt like it was part of the rest of the main college website. The site was as a a custom WordPress theme to allow content managers to easily add press releases and other news stories to the website. The theme included a series of custom taxonomies and custom fields to control how content was published on the home page.
Screenshots and sketches
What I did
- Worked closely with the PR Manager to define the project
- Helped clarify the goals and made sure they matched their ability to maintain the project over time
- Created paper wireframes and final visual designs
- Developed and tested custom WordPress theme, including all custom HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP
- Managed content migration done by a student intern
- Tools used: Illustrator, Dreamweaver, WordPress, Thematic theme, Google Analytics, paper/pen/whiteboards.
Technical tidbit
This was the first of now several web sites and applications that used a common shared library of assets (HTML/CSS/Images) used to make the web presence look the same across different web servers and development frameworks. Internally, we called this ‘Globals’.
A little story
This project was being developed during the time when we were just beginning to embrace social media as an institution. During this time, we set up our Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr presence. At first, the web office (a coworker and I) was posting most of the messages in our social media channels. In addition, during this time I had just begun a photography internship program and we took advantage of this by adding a little Flickr feed into the site. Eventually, the communications office began managing all the social media sites.