“Now we’ve started to roll this out to the public, but we’re not doing this all at once as one big curtain reveal. These changes are like dominoes, so they fall in a certain order. Once we
accomplish one task, the next task can be completed much more easily.” – from the presentation given at the last CMS user’s group meeting

The dominoes are starting to fall: the new Campus Life and Costs & Aid pages are live, the new header and footer are live throughout the site, and we’ve started converting websites to the new responsive template.

As we mentioned before, we’re starting with a focus on subjects of primary importance to prospective students. We’re also front-loading a few sites that have complex aspects. In the early phases, we’re developing and adjusting our process as we go, writing documentation, and bringing in the first CMS user guinea pigs.

Sections that have already been converted:

• About Evergreen
• Tours & Maps
• Search
• Academics

The first wave:

• Admissions
• Advising
• Financial Aid
• Housing & Dining

These sites are the first we’re doing in coordination with our CMS users. We want to especially thank Diane, Kitty, Trina, Noel, and their colleagues for being willing to come with us on this journey.

The next wave:

• Academic Catalog
• Directories
• Student Activities
• Campus Calendar
• Evaluations
• New Students
• Individual Study
• The Masters’ Programs

If you are involved with any of these sites, expect to hear from us after the first of the year. If you are not on that list, keep an eye out for future announcements. Because we’re still working out the process, we don’t have a hard timeline.

For all of our CMS users, the most important thing you can do now is to review your content! Is it current? Was it selected or written with its audience in mind? (Do you know who your primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences are? If not, use this worksheet as a guideline for a discussion with your colleagues.) Having your site up-to-date and well organized will make for a faster transition as we work through the sites.

We’ve upgraded the CMS this week as part of our work towards a more responsive website. CMS users will notice a few changes, which we’ve tried to outline here. As always, if you run into any issues or have problems, let us know.

Your new dashboard

You no longer have a “Starting Page” when you log in. Instead, you have a dashboard with tools for managing and creating content.

The new site header

The site header, which was looking strange for a bit, now looks much as it does on the main site.

Drafts

Cascade now auto-saves drafts while you work. To be honest, we’re not entirely sure how this works, since we haven’t worked with it yet. Just submit & publish as usual, and let us know if something weird happens.

Now that this upgrade is done, we can start moving on converting sections of the website to the new responsive templates. Keep an eye out for more info on that!

For today’s event:

• Content inventory form (XLS)
• Content & structure development worksheet (DOC)

1. Introductions: Susan had everyone introduce themselves to one person they didn’t know, as they came in, since we didn’t have time to go around. She also introduced Elaine [me], and talked about our new designer, Justin, who starts on October 1.
2. Goals (Susan): we’ll be holding these meetings more regularly! We can’t cover everything that was requested, nor everything we think you ought to know. We want you to get the highlights, and to know that you can always ask us for help, whether it’s fixing an error or reworking your whole site.
3. Web Team Plans (Susan): two notable items:
   • An upcoming update will require republishing everything on the website. We’ll send an email to let you know, sometime within the next month. That makes now a good time to clean up your site!
   • We’re working on making the website more responsive, so it works better on mobile devices, starting with the most visible areas for recruitment, retention, and fundraising.
4. Consistency (Susan): a reminder that CMS users are important, providing the critical content that site visitors need. Keeping a consistent look and structure helps those visitors know where they are and where they need to go.
5. Resources (Susan): took a look at the Web Resources page, including the CMS Help and our brand new form for requesting assistance. Also, we’ll be moving the Cascade CMS documentation into the main Computing Help Wiki, but the Web Resources page will still get you there.
6. CMS Updates(Susan): a few little things:
   • Now when you move/rename a page, it automatically unpublishes the page.
   • With speed improvements, no more need to check Publisher Status to see if your pages have published yet.
   • And some little navigation improvements that are easy to show, hard to describe in words.
7. Formatting (Elaine): mostly talking about “what things break for you.”
   • Acknowledging that sometimes text gets horribly mangled, and it happens to all of us, especially when pasting from Word. In some browsers you can use the Paste as Plain Text button, otherwise a two-step paste (Word > Notepad/Textedit > Cascade) can help. If something’s hopelessly mangled, contact the Web Team to get faster clean-up, or use the Versions feature (under More) to go back to an older version of the page.
   • Demonstrated two link checking tools: the W3C Link Validator, and a Firefox Add-in.
8. Questions, in which we covered:
   • A bit about images and how to align them to one side or the other.
   • Bulk uploading (go to Tools > Zip Archive)
   • Google Analytics, showing a report we created to help one site understand what their top pages were.