A couple of months before I graduated, I was offered a full-time job at FH Joanneum University of Applied Sciences, my alma mater. It was a new position at the University’s PR/Marketing Department, although there was an IT Department that would usually employ someone with my background. The idea was to use internet as the main channel of communication and, therefore, to have “the internet guy” at hand in order to avoid bureaucratic backlogging. As it turned out, someone with my skill set could contribute much more than web design.
The old system was developed in 2001 using ASP/SQL and it relied on HTML knowledge and FTP content upload. In the following years, the concept of Content Management grew to the point where it was considered a standard system feature. After testing a series of open source and commercial software, the University decided to purchase the ActiveWeb solution developed by a German company.
This was a whole new world to me, since I never had an opportunity to deal with XML and XSL transformations upon which the system relied. All query responses had to be in XML-DOM for the system to process, so it was fun to learn this new technology that was a drag at first for someone with straight, procedural thinking, but once I got behind XPath axes and node relationships I started digging this system to the point of worship 🙂
However, the coding had to come last. In the time before the actual redesign, I spent a lot of time with people who would be using this system, especially for the parts that were reserved for the intranet. Having future students, current students, faculty, employees and partner companies as target groups, I managed to obtain sufficient information to define their needs and expectations.
The existing data had to be “cleansed” of any HTML tags and content, where some parts needed to be completely rewritten, since they weren’t optimized for online reading. New information was added and the next step was the “card sorting method” to categorize the data, label it and display in such a manner that it was easy to find and understand.
The layout of the bilingual website was designed in conformity with the 16-column 960px grid system. Since the whole website was DOM-based, the JS driven menu was generated and cached every time there was a change in the system on objects that would be displayed in the drop-down menu.
There were around 40 newly assigned web content editors that I trained and provided support in using the system. They were able to conduct their tasks in the system’s back-end or “live”, while surfing the pages in the “context edit” mode, where they clicked on (now visible) buttons.
Once indexed, Google reported around 45,000 indexed web pages. This number rose to 333,000 in October 2011.
