athletics3.6

Originally uploaded by Jason 2.0.
With all the malay of stuff we’ve had to do, I’ve been pretty much out of the loop of what i had hoped to be doing on this project. I’m still a CSS/XHTML beginner and have been kindof relegated to a project manager-type person. I guess we need something like this to hold things together and chart the course, but I was really hoping to have time to get my hands dirtier.

Here are some evolutionary designs for the new athletics site. Joel is designing the main areas, so I’m working on athletics. The funny thing is that I haven’t really designed anything in a few years with more focus being in the video production end as well as IA and User experience. So, I’m needing any feedback from anyone that is reading. Not much feedback here at work. I’ll post some details on each design and hope for some comments. Thebiggest thing that we’re working around is learning a new CMS, so we can’t be too cute with design. I pulled some inspiration from the usual suspects like ESPN, CNNSI, as well as NFL.com’s New England Patriot’s site. That and what the SID brought from local schools and features he requested. Putting that with the current design and timeline, and we have these to work with.

As far as things go here, we’re a month behind and two weeks behind from our week behind timelines. Bottom line: it’s going to be chaotic.

We went through some initial graffles of workflow for targeted constituent groups on campus and will refine those this week.  Our task early is to wireframe the main sections.  I’m headed to InDesign in a few minutes after I do some serious whiteboarding with Joel.  Our bosses are crying out for visual design, and we haven’t even begun it yet.  Feeling like we’re doing diligence with the importan things of content analysis, IA, and messaging/telling the story first.  But today we’re feeling the crunch of getting at least a bare bones design/ideas and wireframes to at least pick apart.

I started reading Bulletproof Friday and will try to devote at least an hour a day to reading and growing in XHTML/CSS, and thinking the right ways about how we need to build this site.  All this and also beginning to play around with Expression Engine.  So I’m really learning…well…I don’t really know how many new things I’m taking in.  But Expression Engine is a tool that I’m thinking about using for a missionary in Africa to manage her content and images.  That and our church is going to EE.  And I have a couple of potential clients that are asking for some sort of CMS.  Of course they aren’t asking specifically for CMS, but wanting all the trappings that go with it.  I’m flirting right now with Expression Engine.  Looked at Plone and some other open-source options, but think that EE could be the way to go if I can invest the time to learn it as well.  Man, I need a mentor to walk me through all of this…

Graduate Workflow Graffle 1.0

Originally uploaded by Jason 2.0.

Because I’m an extremely creative person that thinks visually, it’s been hard to do content inventory and evaluation in Excel. Just seeing page names, ID’s and columns looks foreign. I’ve acclimated somewhat, but when it comes to deconstructing the site and reconstructing, I have to be able to draw. Tim thankfully ordered a huge dry erase board for the conference room and I took full use of it.

Using the Excel and discussion, I simply went in and started drawing a schematic. From that, as a group we were able to solve some very real problems with how our admissions workflow can change.

It’s hard dealing in higher ed with academic programs that each have their own enrollment process, application, and cost. The marketing group, us, has to find a way to make the enrollment and overall Web experience for the end user/prospective student seamless, while the back ground internal constituency is definitely divided into their own pieces of the pie.

Fortunately, I think we came up with a plan that will allow us to translate our internal cultural values to the external audience without confusing them. It was a real breakthrough, because I think we are going to be able to do this for the entire graduate studies site as well as the Degree Completion area. We may even bring the flow into SAUonline. Major victory for us figuring out the “batch”. Let me know what you think of the initial graffle. I’d love to hear some comments. Got some already, so will be making those changes todayish.

Instead, he was busting my chops. Why? He came a year or so ago for a one-day training in CSS. We worked on a project, took notes, and watched him do amazing things with CSS. When it was done, it looked beautiful. We enjoyed the time, thanked him, got excited about CSS, but our jobs began to crowd out our vigor. I was pulled out on a 6-month video project to write, interview, edit and produce. We lost the momentum.

What’s necessity? Yeah. To use a Biblical metaphor, it’s Shaddrach, Meshach, Abendigo, and Jason. Thrown into the firey furnace.

We’ve been evaluating every piece of content on the site, putting it all in Excel, and evaluating. Now we’ve got what we’ve been told is a “Content Inventory Matrix” of all content on arbor.edu. It’s pretty daunting. We still don’t know how to use the CMS we bought. Still no knowledge of CSS or XHTML. But I have been using everything I’ve read from Don’t Make Me Think to get the content right and user experience/IA in the right direction. So, who knows what’s up the road? We’ve got the lamp shining a step or two ahead. Not much farther.