After 15 Months The Redesign is Complete
Back in March of last year I started the redesign of the SIUC Aviation homepage. Right from the beginning I knew it would be a rather ambitious project I just slightly underestimated exactly how ambitious it would be.
Initially the idea was to update the homemade CMS we were using to make better use of technologies such as RSS and mod-rewrite. As the core of the code was 12 years old it seemed like it should be a long, but relatively straightforward project. In addition, we hoped to streamline the site content to better serve prospective and current students by eliminating obsolete features and re-writing a lot of the content to both bring it up to date and to address the needs we’ve seen arise over the last couple of years.
Like so many simple ideas this one quickly grew to an entirely new monster.
First, I decided that the department would be better served by established CMS products than by my own code. This would serve two purposes. First, it would allow me to concentrate on content rather than the functionality of the CMS. Second, it would allow for easier maintenance should I leave here (which we plan to do in a few years at most). I didn’t want something that would require constant coding and bandaids by someone whom I wasn’t familiar with the code. The only way I could see to overcome this was to use existing software.
Next, while concentrating on content, two things became very obvious. First, we were trying to do too much with one site. Our homepage was trying to be everything to everyone and winding up being less then useful to all. Second, we have been selling ourselves simply as Aviation for years. The catch is we, as flight and management, are only one piece of the total Aviation offerings. There is also an aviation technologies department which had absolutely no presence on the aviation website. This division was bad on many levels for both departments.
Finally, up until this point we have been operating on a rather obsolete mindset. Like many groups our administration viewed the website as a nice bulletin board but not much more. While students were searching Google for where they want to go to college our budget was being spent on ads in magazines that barely touch our target audience as well as give-aways and other programs geared toward a sometimes apathetic alumni base. Nothing was going to attract new blood in places where that new blood was lurking.
To address these problems required a lot more legwork than originally planned on. First, we decided to replace our site with not one single site, but two sites and a dynamic system capable of providing sites quickly for almost any aspect of our community. Next, we tackled a long standing political feud to combine the web presence of two departments into a single online presence. Finally, we spent almost 4 months on initial training and, as my colleagues call it, brain washing our people into working with us online in providing content and working to increase our presence in many areas where our competition already had a great lead.
Today our online presence is divided into 3 pieces. Our mane website, www.aviation.siuc.edu, is a recruiting and retention tool designed to provide information to students, their families, and our alumni. Next, for all our internal needs we built a wiki to allow for quick collaboration and easy editing of volumes of information that only really pertains to our faculty and staff. Finally, to provide a quick, easy, and uniform publishing platform for all of our community we created blogs.aviation.siuc.edu which allows any individual or group in the SIUC Aviation community to quickly and easily build a website specific to their own needs while still maintaining a level of control of both security and brand at the department level.
As each of these sites is designed to fulfill a different goal it follows that they each then use different software to accomplish those goals. To do this we picked Drupal for our main website, MediaWiki for our intranet/wiki, and WordPress MU(Now WordPress 3 with multisite) for the “Blogs and sites” system. Together these software packages have allowed us to expand our online presence in a manner that makes sense for everyone while preserving all that data that previous was smashed together on a single site. In addition, through the use of such common products, we have been able to train a host of users who maintain content on their own sites or projects throughout all 3 sites.
Once we had the software picked and installed and the initial users trained the cultural shift in our marketing began to take shape. For the first time we saw some of our marketing budget going to online resources instead of dying magazines and newspapers. Data from sources such as Google Analytics was finally views as something other than a bunch of lines on a piece of paper.
In the end, I’m happy to report that we have come up with a not just a website, but a solution that brings the department into the modern era. While there is still and always will be work to be done it is nice to see that we have finally shifted into drive and are proceeding ahead.
