Update on the new CIS website

It's been nearly three months since I mentioned updating the CIS website. So, what's the progress?

I wrapped up drafting the document mentioned in that previous post, which I sent along to The Wallace Center with a request for a timeline and budget estimate. By the start of August, the project was approved!!! This is huge news, as a new website has been a long time coming, and it was not necessarily an easy sell. And there was much rejoicing - yaaaaay!

From there it was time for me to start developing a full site map that detailed every page that was to be built. Around a month ago I had a webpage created that basically dumped all of the node numbers and page titles for every page on the CIS website - of which there are over 1200 - into a table. I imported this table into an Excel document and have been going through each page.... one by one.... determining what the page content is, whether it is still relevant, and how it would fit into a new structure. A fair amount (about half) of the 1,200 pages are news entries, events, and seminars, which will more or less be a straightforward port to the new site. There are a bunch of pages with content that would be more appropriate as a viewable/downloadable PDF rather than a webpage, which both saves work (having to transfer over) and creates work (having to convert all these things to PDF) - but that will come later. A few pages can be archived, while a handful of others should be downright eliminated. After thumbing through each one of the 1,200 pages, I have ended up with a list of ~90 that will actually comprise the new website.

I have incorporated these 90-ish pages into the requirements and expectations document as a full sitemap, organized into several menu categories. However, this overall layout will still need to be reviewed page-by-page with the web designers so that they can determine how the structure of the site will play out, and also what the layout of each page will be. They also may suggest to rearrange/combine/eliminate some pages or categories, which I'm totally fine with since they're the professionals. This will be a very, very long process - probably months-long. (I'm ready.)

In the meantime, from the site map we will pick five pages for initial design mockups. Before those can be done, though, we need to hone in on design preferences (general color scheme, layout, etc), which is where we are at right now! Additionally, we need to have a meeting that includes the new designers as well as the folks here who are familiar with the current database setups, so that we can determine how the new website will incorporate all of our ultra-important databases. This, I think, will be one of the most challenging aspects of the overall project... but perhaps I just think that because I am not too familiar with database management. (Note to future self reading this: look into database classes.)

So, what happens from here? After we meet to discuss the databases, the design preferences, and do an initial run-through of the sitemap, the five mockups will be created by the design team. I can't wait to see what they have in store for us!