As you may have noticed, last week was a little quiet here on the blog. Even though we urge bloggers to post at least once a week, sometimes the Web team also encounters issues on the road to happy posting.
For one thing, the search engine on the site went down last Wednesday. That has led to lots of phone calls and e-mails, all of which have been pleasant, in spite of the situation. Happily, the situation is being resolved (hooray for support contracts!), and the solution is in the mail—somewhere on campus—even as I write this.
Our forums also keep us busy, and we’re pleased in this case that it’s brought us a new forum moderator for the Orientation forum. So please, join me in welcoming Robert Mead-Colegrove as the new moderator. If you see him on campus, be sure to say “Don’t be modest moderator, you’re doing a great job!”. You may also elect to not say that, and substitute your own lousy pun, of course.
But what about the refresh?
The real news, however, is about the refresh. Yes, our planned refresh for the Buffalo State College Web site is moving through the planning and development phases. I know there’s been a lot of discussion on here about the issues we’ve faced, but now we’re going to start sharing a bit more of the upcoming features and design.
At our Web Team meeting yesterday, we made a couple of decisions. First, we’ve set the end of March as the milestone for design and navigation resolution. This will mean that large-scale design issues should be worked out by this point, and the site you see will closely match what is launched. It also means that the navigation you see (for example: About Buffalo State, Academics, etc.) in our draft site, should be what shows up in the final product.
Our other decision (about the refresh, for there were other decisions made) was that we’re going to be sharing specific features and design elements of the refresh right here on the blog. Yes! Right here! This will be the first time we’ll be sharing these items outside the office, and we’re pretty excited about it! Well, I’m pretty excited about it. Everyone else seemed excited about it too, but I don’t want to put words in my colleagues’ mouths.
Once these elements are up, we look forward to hearing from the campus community. We expect every response—bouquets of flowers to be thrown, vitriolic rampages, laughter, tears, excitement, etceterament—and trust us: we’re ok with that. If we didn’t want to hear from you, we wouldn’t be sharing this information.
Get your fingers limber and ready to type. We can’t wait to hear what you have to say.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some XML to attend to.
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