Q&A with New Media checks in on recent projects

November 02, 2011

From the digital screens around campus to the website home page, the hard work of the New Media team is easy to see this fall. In addition to these conspicuous projects, the team has been busy with some behind-the-scenes projects, like a new search engine. The New Media staff includes David McKelvey, director; Morgan Grether, web content systems manager; and Nick Shobe, web applications developer, who joined the team in September. Lawrence Siulagi, web developer at the law school, also works closely with New Media.

In this Q & A, McKelvey discusses the exciting projects New Media has launched this fall, as well as some new updates on the horizon.

In the past few weeks, the Lewis & Clark home page has undergone lots of changes. What was the motivation for the redesign, and what are the new features of the page?

The institutional (and now undergraduate) home page has remained mostly untouched since our redesign in the summer of 2009. This fall, we made a concerted push to improve the design, navigation, and features for our external audiences.

The change that I’d say had the most impact—but is little seen—is that the undergraduate home page merged into the institutional home page in mid-September. This allowed us to gain efficiency and focus our messages.

The remainder of the changes modernized and improved the content areas of the lclark.edu home page. With the addition of a story-rotation switcher for top features and a redesign of the lower half of the page, we have honed the available content streams (news, events, etc.) and responded to the types of communication needs we’ve seen develop over the last two years. Specifically, we took advantage of this opportunity to add a community-generated element—the photostream—which highlights an authentic view of Lewis & Clark through the eyes of community members and visitors.

What’s happening with content on the old website (legacy.lclark.edu pages)?

Morgan and Lawrence have already archived and removed most of the content on legacy.lclark.edu that was managed by our former content management system, Trillium. We are planning for the removal of the rest of the content on our way to the long-term plan to shutting down the server completely.

At present, ~ (tilde) sites are unaffected by our work and will continue to function as they have in the past.

In addition, we are almost done recreating all forms from the legacy site in LiveWhale, where they are editable.

How is the Lewis & Clark search engine being improved, and when can visitors to our site expect to see updates to that tool?

By the time you read this, we will have launched a prototype of the new search engine. However, before we replace the existing engine, we’ll be running it through some user testing to see how well it performs and make some final changes to the user experience. (Contact me if you’re interested in being a tester.) Given our current progress, I expect you’ll see an opportunity to try out the new engine in a couple of weeks, and we’ll replace the engine soon thereafter.

The new engine sports a number of features based upon the feedback we’ve received over the last two years. Under the hood, Nick has completely rewritten how the search engine understands your search terms, which has improved results and the ability to conduct more advanced searches. Visually, the engine has an entirely new layout and design. It has better people searching and ways to limit your search to a select area of the site. Finally, we’ll be offering Google results through the engine as well.

Digital screens went up around campus over the summer. Where did that project come from, and what are the goals for the screens?

Doing some form of digital signage on campus has been around for a long time, and I’ve broken out a short history on our blog, which also lists the locations of the ten screens across all three campuses. The goal for the screens is relatively simple: to help our community and our visitors be more aware of events on campus, particularly ones that can enhance our educational mission.

As with most of New Media’s work, we put the user first, so we are watching how people are using them and listening to what people think of the screens and hearing their great ideas for how they could be used in the future. We were very thoughtful in creating these and will continue that process through future enhancements, including how we bring user interaction to the screens.

What are the criteria for posting an event to the digital screens?

Anyone who uses our content management system, LiveWhale, has the ability to post events to the digital screens. We ask people to keep a few things in mind when they are sending events to the screens.

First, think about the audience. People walk by these screens quickly, so essential information (title, time, summary) is required. Events must also be plotted on a map. “Geolocation” is a new option within LiveWhale, and it allows us to ensure that the events displayed on the screens are happening locally, rather than somewhere else across the country. Images are not required, but they do get your event a lot more attention. We suggest you upload the biggest version of the image that you have—LiveWhale will take care of resizing it for the screens.

Before you run off to see that your event is on the screens, be aware that we’ve only allowed up to the next 12 days or 20 events on the screens at a time. Your event will not display if it’s farther out. We know that this makes figuring out if your event has made it to the screens a bit of a challenge, so we’re working on a new feature for LiveWhale that will show that your event is, or will be, on the screens.

What else would you like the community to know?

One other project that just wrapped up affects groups’ navigation. You can now edit your right-hand navigation menu in LiveWhale. If you’re interested in doing so, get in touch with us to talk about best practices and training. 

We’re moving at a fast clip, and I’m thankful that people have been very understanding about how busy we are in New Media, but don’t let this prevent you from asking for help with everything from how to update websites to consulting on hosted applications. By nature, we are immersed in the best practices of web, email, and mobile technologies, particularly as they apply to marketing.

For users of LiveWhale, we have a lot of online resources in our support site, offer regular class and one-on-one trainings, and hold office hours in the Dovecote and the Legal Research Center on Wednesdays.

If that won’t do, you can just email us questions. You can also follow us on Twitter @lcweblab, read our blog and comment, or keep up with bugs and fixes from our system status feed.