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Web Solutions
Focus:
Design, implement, refine and maintain the IST Web Sites as an effective Web presence to the outside world and improve the IST community with a shared private environment.
Plans and Goals:
- Enhance the Web content management system (CMS)
- Lead adoption of Web Standards, Usability, and Accessibility at Penn State.
- Implement a distributed best practices, update processes and procedures
- Research and integrate marketing and branding efforts to improve Web presence
- Review and refine Web architecture and design
- Continue investigation of innovative Web design
Accomplishments:
The College of Information Sciences and Technology, on Thursday February 17th, 2005, released a major update to the college's Web presence. With the third major release of IST Web, the IST Solutions Institute utilized a best practices Web design and development methodology that emphasized the needs of the end user first. We had spent nearly 18 months collecting data from the college's stakeholders and created a new site that more completely met the needs of these audiences.
The redesigned site was much more than a new look and feel - although we are convinced our primary users will be very happy with what they see. Built on our own, state-of-the-art content management system, the new IST Web site employs an XHTML compliant display engine that uses CSS to make it accessible to visitors with disabilities and gives us total control over look and feel with the lightest code base. From the entire staff of the Solutions Institute, to the IST administration, to the major stakeholders across the college, the countless students who provided feedback, and so many others, this new design is truly one that focuses its energy on the intersection of end user needs and the primary goals of IST.
The methodology utilized is a blended one that borrows from software engineering, project management, information architecture principles, HCI fundamentals, and the Solutions Institute's own design and development processes. This methodology has provided us with an outcome that we hope will create a solid foundation for IST to continue to grow on for years to come.
Primary Technologies Utilized:
- RSS: Really Simple Syndication is a powerful web syndication protocol that is used for the exchange of news and other ever-changing information. The site's RSS underpinnings allow it to be subscribed to at the site or page level. This allows us to provide content to numerous services in a streamlined, open standards fashion.
- CSS: Cascading Style Sheets are a presentation formatting technique that allows site designers to separate the content layer from the presentation layer. This separation allows sites to be updated very quickly, allow for a much lighter code basis, and generally provides for a much more clean and open design.
- XHTML: eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language is a markup language, much like standard HTML, but is more modern and utilizes a stricter implementation. The use of XHTML enables IST to, among other things, enable the site to be displayed on multiple devices and be powered exclusively by CSS.
- CMS Driven: The Solutions Institute created a Content Management System to allow a distributed content author model with the lowest overall impact on site administrators. The CMS has been built on ColdFusion and utilizes Microsoft's SQLServer Database Management System. It is a robust environment that allows content authors across the college to create, edit, and publish content with little to no Web authoring skills.
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