university of minnesota law website – cali 6/19/2004 – gene danilenko redesign and management of...
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University of Minnesota Law Website – CALI 6/19/2004 – Gene Danilenko
Redesign and Management of the Law School Website
Conference For Law School Computing 2004
Gene Danilenko, University of Minnesota Law School
Jennifer Carpenter, Duke University Law School
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Before …
Nonstandard Color Scheme
Inconsistent Navigation Inconsistent Design Static HTML Pages Centralized Content
Management (through webmaster)
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After …
Color & design consistent with main U
Integrated, intuitive navigation
Mainly database driven Content management
system - decentralized
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Need & Goals For New Site
New Dean Student comments about usability University guidelines for look and feel Easier way to keep content fresh Highlight “higher value” areas
Prospective Students; External Relations; Calendar/Events
Be Cheap
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Resources
Nick Spilman, Sr. Web Programmer 100% time. Architecture. Development
Tim Fay, Webmaster 50% time. Development. Content 50% time existing site
Gene Danilenko, Educational Tech. 10% time. Rollout. Training
University Web Depot (templates) Law School users And not much of…
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Timeline
6.5 Months Total from Go to Rollout
July 1, 2003 Project gets go ahead
August 1 Requirements documented
September 1 CMS chosen
October 1 Skeleton site built, first iteration of feedback
November 30 Last (#4) feedback iteration for prodn. v. 1
December 17 Final code. Changes frozen
December 18 Content migration starts
Jan 12, 2004 Production site live. Training starts Feb 1.
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Overall Process
DevelopRequirements
Choose CMS
Create InitialDesign
IntegrateDesign, CMS,
Process
4 cycles of iterative dev
Transferexisting site
Rollout &Train
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Design & CMS Selection
Used University provided templates Existing stock photos
University provided generic stock From Law School publications
In-house conference on structuring content Evaluated University’s solution
Spendy (Filenet Enterprise CM)
Evaluated Zope, OpenCMS, WebGUI WebGui 5.4 chosen – knowledge of Perl MySQL backend database
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Development
Used small group of testersCareer services, Admissions
Rapid development4 cyclesUser feedback for functionality, look and feel
Customized WebGUI for our templates and standard authentication
About 10 weeks of development1.25 FTE on tech development .25 FTE on content development
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Migration & Rollout
Customized scriptsTransfer “existing” content to dbPurged “worst content”Still needed manual clean-up
Formally trained beta users February Reworked training and started with high
impact content Developed online tutorial
http://listserv.law.umn.edu/~danilenko/CI5362_tutorhome.htm
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On The Horizon
A slightly modified Front Page A new round of photos and graphics Adding streams of special seminars Even more training A part-time web content editor? Ongoing maintenance