Top Sites Reviewed and Other Examples

Cornell University: http://www.cornell.edu/ 
Pro: Easy to read and navigate, collegial, clean
Con: Stuffy/Formal, Not student friendly, not enrollment oriented

Pima College: http://www.pima.edu/
Pro: well laid out, easy to navigate, provided great information, nice design
Con: narrow fixed width layout design, could be more dynamic, not too exciting

Northland College: http://northland.edu/ 
 Pro:  faculty profiles, good use of images and student testimonials, fonts, events calendar, pleasant layout, lots of white space, fresh design, color scheme, navigation, drop down bars on top navigation.

Con: lack of good integrated course information; library site is completely different.




Portland Community College: http://www.pcc.edu/
Pro: Program Information, consistent site, student centered, 5 main topics - use of photos
Con: Color scheme is boring, no visual appeal

Washtenaw Community College
http://www.wccnet.edu/

Pro:  Very creative, unique, very appropriate blend of color, design, and graphics, calendar page, course listing, navigation and layout
Con: busy, distracting, events pushed to the bottom of page

Biola University http://www.biola.edu/undergrad/ (peoples choice)
Pro: Nice campus map. Colors and graphics. Verbiage is good and student friendly. Graphics are hip and eye catching. Exciting and vibrant. A lot of information in a student friendly format.
Con:  Main navigation links are not as easy to see as they conflict with all of the information on the front page.

Randolph College
http://www.randolphcollege.edu/x5.xml

Pro: nice clean look, consistent, uncluttered design, good contrast, dominant student images, good search feature, rss feeds, video with photo layout on main page, heavy use of flash (pro/con)
Con: bottom half of main page doesn't balance the top (heavy graphics on top), some navigation (tiny text on top), courses/programs hard to find

Gateway Community College - Program page
http://www.gatewaycc.edu/Programs/
Pro:  Program page:  nice use of photos, navigation is clear, student centered information, thumbnails good use of faculty marketing/blog/etc.





Boston University http://www.bu.edu/
Drop Down Menu Example
Virginia Commenwealth University (new) (DROP DOWN MENU EXAMPLE)
http://www.preview.vcu.edu/index.php

http://web.trinity.edu/x845.xml  (nice news and events page) ea, nice slideshow with images
Washington State University has a nice photo/video on home page

Solution48/Bigfish

Notes from Solution48/Bigfish meeting 12.11.09
Joe Pizzimenti (owner), Brian Kevitt, and James Palazzolo (Drupal expert)
Phil Munroe, Eileen Archibald, Kurt Chambers, Scott Morken

480-355-2550
7898 E. Acoma Drive, Suite 207
Scottsdale, AZ  85260

Discovery:
They had good questions regarding the past work we have done in usability studies, analytics, etc.

Creativity:
Looking at the web work they did for Scottsdale Healthcare, Sage Software, Humana (micro site), and some other big players, they have a skilled creative team and good design concepts.  Their experience extends outside of websites, and encompasses print design, sales & marketing, and "the bigger picture". This could prove useful in other respects.

Programming/Development:
Their skill in coding can be difficult to determine based solely on viewing a website, but some information can and should be garnished by viewing work they have done. Need to review their experience in PHP and Drupal. It seems they are a full-service shop.  Should review web practices to for implementation of progressive techniques such as image replacement and use of CSS.

They have proven the ability or proof of concept of their ability to integrate PeopleSoft with a local website.

Social Media site they developed for ASU and other universities. BETA Digidorm.com

General:
They seem like a cross-trained, diverse group, because they do consulting, creative work, programming and implementation.

Programming skills in PHP and .NET platforms. The CMS's they recommended for Mesa/Scottsdale were Sitefinity and Drupal, which are .NET and PHP, respectively.  Their recommendation also reflects their desire to develop on a platform that is progressive, SEO friendly, and somewhat easy to develop on.

James has experience with Drupal, including his experience with ASU, which uses Drupal extensively. James' title is Public/Media Relations, Social Media.  For example, how many websites have they built in Drupal. How long have they been working with Drupal. How many other PHP systems have they worked with?

They will send examples of the educational sites they have completed.

Portland State University's experience with Swipht and Drupal

Overview

Portland State University (PSU) has the largest overall enrollment of any university in Oregon. PSU's aging Content Management System (CMS) was based on Binary Cloud, and was unsuitable to adapt to growth. So they sought out a new system that would serve the university's needs. One the developers at PSU was familiar with the capabilities of Drupal, and eventually through an RFP/RFQ process, Swipht Technologies was chosen to help PSU migrate 60+ department sites into a single codebase of Drupal.

According to Swipht, it was the largest scale Drupal integration at that time. According to Swipht, "the new system had to support central sign-on, a sophisticated security policy, and provide a means to share content between different departments and organization websites."

The solution included contributed modules and custom module development to adress the needs. It was basically done in several stages. The first stage was the design and development of a flexible department site which included a deployment process that rapidly deployed sites (installation profile). The second included a central syndication server to provide shared content and media to department sites on demand. The third effort involved the actual migration of content and structure from the old CMS into the new multi-site Drupal framework.

They do not use reverse proxy or other configurations. PSU's servers run on load balanced servers using standard Drupal caching. Their multi-site installation runs under a single Drupal code base, so upgrades only need to be done once at the root level.

PSU's Overview of the Process

Kristin Boden-MacKay, the Director of Web Communications at Portland State University had some good insight into their process.

In short, the whole process took about a year a half. Kristin came in about halfway through the process, after they had already chosen the vendor. As of December 2009, They have 122 distinct sites on their Drupal codebase, and plan to continue migration of more sites. They have about 640 sites in total, so it will be a long, continuous process. She classifies their system as an enterprise solution.

Their old setup was on a BinaryCloud development platform. They are very happy with the new Drupal platform which they've had for over 2 years now, and they have had no problems with it. University Communications provides the templates to the departments, and gives them access to their "sites", from which they can create their web pages and menus.

Kristin related that there's not an easy way to create content in multiple environments—that Drupal is not built to that capacity. I believe that was the reason for the media/syndication server, to share content and certain database tables as needed, while maintaining administrative separation using the multi-site approach.

[Here are some links to multi-site configurations: Drupal multisite, managing multisite, scalability]

Unified Vision

Their identity process is led at the president's level, and they have a unified vision to continue integrating Drupal campus-wide. The department sites do not permit administration of modules or allow PHP scripting in their pages. They work from the basic install profile that is deployed for their site. This gives departments the flexibility they need, but keeps things simple for them and easy to administer content.

Swipht Technologies

They did run over budget and Swipht took a little longer than they planned to complete the whole process, but it was a large work. The project management was not quite as clean as she would have liked to have seen, but in the end it worked out well.

Swipht did not do any of the design work. It was done in house by PSU. Swipht converted the designs into code (HTML and PHP = aka: Drupal theme). And of course Swipht did the consulting, drupal programming and integration of the multiple sites, as well as creating the custom tool to install (replicate) "multisites". (Aegir has matured since then. I don't believe PSU is using Aegir.)

Workflow Processes

They don't have much automated "workflow" processes in place for content approval (for example, they don't have a specialized process for people to contribute to the event calendar, etc.). Actually, they're trying to cut back on the number of pages. She said they have over 300,000 pages being served throughout the campus, and are trying to trim that down as they integrate more sites into their Drupal 'network'.

Here are some specifics about Swipht's work with PSU, taken from Swipht's website:

Drupal Department Site Features:

• Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
• Ldap user account migration (custom work)
• Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
• Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
• Google Search Appliance Integration
• Per-site media management
• WYSIWYG Editor integration
• Generic Analytics integration (custom work)
• Google Analytics integration
• Search Engine Optimized XML Sitemap
• Content Access Security (custom work)
• Menu Access Security (custom work)
• Syndication client management and display (custom work)
• PSU Drupal theme (used on all sites)
• PSU Home Drupal theme
• Sophisticated Drupal theme settings and media management (custom work)

Drupal Syndication Server Features:

• Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
• Ldap user account migration (custom work)
• Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
• Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
• Content Access Security (custom work)
• Menu Access Security (custom work)
• Custom content authoring (news, events, profiles, faqs)
• Multi-category tagging and classification system
• Web-services XML syndication framework (community/custom work)

PSU Contact Information

University Communications:

• Jennifer Williamson, AVP UComm and Public Affairs, 503-725-3711
• Kristin Boden-MacKay, Director of Web Communications, 503-725-8745
• Therese Graner, Web Communications Lead
• Jodi Hewett, Web Communications Lead
• Tracy Weber, Marketing Communications Assistant

General Contacts:

• Phone: 503-725-3711
• Fax: 503-725-4465
• ucomm@pdx.edu

Parallax Visual Communication

 Parallax Visual Communication Web Development Outline and Links to Customers

 http://www.parallaxviscom.com/index.php/meet/
Jonathan@thinkparallax.com

http://ftp.parallaxviscom.com/newsletter12/pvc_newsletter12.html

Here is brief outline of the steps you should take/we take when going through the web redesign process. It will be smart to meet internally to see what pieces you can handle vs. what you can outsource. We can talk more about where we might be able to fit in.

Web Committee
Organize a group of 4-6 people that will be able to give valuable input through out the process. IT, Marketing, Development/Recruitment - and definitely someone that has a good pulse on the organization. Who gets the big picture and has a vision for the future. Maybe that's you:)

1. Discovery/Needs Assessment
The discovery phase will be a Q+A with the web committee and possibly department to determine all of the goals of the organization. You'll need to determine what currently works/doesn't work, what do we want to achieve with the website and what tools will be need to achieve those goals. When
you itemize the goals you'll be able to figure what tools/applications will be needed to action - and what Drupal has that you can incorporate.

During this phase you or the company you are working with should identify competition, likes dislike etc. It will help you visual what works/doesn't and what you might want to include.

We are in the discovery phase of a big redesign for the Water Authority here and they wanted every department to have a say - so now we have a list of 150 items for their wish list which is about 140 more than is in the proposal. So having a discovery will be really helpful to finding out what you need before you get started or hire a firm. You can also hire a firm to just handle the discovery.

In this process you can also post a questionairre on your external site to get public opinion about what they want and do an internal survey to see what staff/faculty etc. are thinking. I can give you a set of questions to work off of and you could use Survey Monkey - super simple and cost effective.

Requirements
After and while your going through the discovery phase you'll want to finalize the technical requirements and also the workflows. How will a user post to the site, who the owners will be, who will manage, post content and how the whole process will work.


2. Planning, Architecture, site map, wireframes
After you've gone through and finalized all of the requirements and what will be included you can phase the project - what we can do in the first, second - etc.
You should be able to get pretty good pricing from any firm at this point and you'll also be able to see what you can handle internally vs. externally.

At this point you can start to create the site map/information architecture about where all of the information will live and how the user will flow through the site.

3. Design
After the site map, you'll move to wireframes and then the concepting design portion.
Your familiar with the design part, but generally we come up with 3 unique options for the homepage, 2 rounds of revisions. And the same for a standard subpage and then additional unique subpages. Before this you will have determined what types of interactivity that will be included - user
submitted content etc.

4. Development
When the design is finalized you can begin with the development process, which can be started while the design is being finalized. There should be a staging server (testing environment) before launch. And I would rec. doing it in phases. You'll add a truck load of stress to try to knock it all out at once.

5. Launch/Results
While it's being launched - test and make changes. Have predetermined measurements to get the ROI

Here are some links and pdf/screen shots of sites we've finished and are working on.
If you have time for a call, I can go through in more detail. I'll call you either way to follow up next week.


Here is the online virtual tradeshow for Qualcomm (I talked about doing the same thing as an Open House for schools)
http://www.parallaxviscom.com/qualcomm_tradeshow08/

http://www.visitcwc.com
Site for Visit California finished a few months ago

Here is  a screen shot of the web redesign for the San Diego Comm. School district. And below is the link on how their internal developer is executing the site. This is a great example of how/why the design team should be involved for feedback when an organization goes through an develops the site themselves. See if you notice the difference between the two. I'm going to give them feedback next week regardless, but even it's 10-20 hours that we would work with you through the dev. process, I think it's worth it.
http://employee.sdce.edu./   (being developed in drupal)
It will launch in a few weeks.

And here is where we are at with the UCSD site - the first is a static home page and the second an interactive timeline. Work in progress.
homepage http://www.parallaxviscom.com/UCSD/index.html
interactive timeline
http://www.parallaxviscom.com/UCSD/main.html


Smaller sites for different clients/industries

www.spicynothings.com
branding, packaging for food client

http://fosteringchange.org/
Joomla (open source) for non profit

http://www.stadiaclothing.com/default.aspx
http://jivaactive.com/
clothing clients/shopping cart

Qualcomm Annual Reports
http://www.parallaxviscom.com/qualcomm/ARAP/
http://www.parallaxviscom.com/qualcomm/ARAP07/

Micro site for water authority (being developed in drupal) I'll send another email with a presentation for UCSD.

Talk to you soon!

Thanks!

Jonathan

Northland Pioneer - Drupal and Image X Media Experience

Northland Pioneer College's Experience with Drupal and ImageX Media
Northland Pioneer College is a regionally accredited, publicly supported community college serving several diverse areas in Navajo County, Arizona. They are based in Holbrook, but have 4 campuses and 6 centers.

NPC did not have a dedicated webmaster or skilled team to maintain a growing internet presence. They had looked at a few commercial systems as well as Drupal, in search of something robust and scalable. In the end, NPC approached ImageX Media looking for a solution.

ImageX delivered the complete package for them, from consulting, design, building and integration. NPC has a 1-1/2 year working relationship with ImageX. The communications director, Ann Hess, said she liked that Drupal was free, but was not completely sold on Drupal. After having worked with it, she is extremely happy with it, and it has served them well.

ImageX created workflow automation for them so that many repetitive tasks that were being done by administrative staff can now be reduced. As a smaller college, maybe 3500 students, they don't have large departments or lots of people to help edit the pages, so the workflow process helps things move along, and she can give access to different departments, so only they can manage their own areas. They are apparently not using Multisite. They have just one website, one server, etc.

As Ann described it, ImageX used Drupal to create a moderation system to edit pages relevant to what each area does. In other words, there are access restrictions per department or division, so they can't administer other areas of the website. I'm not certain how they implemented this.

A couple possible ways would be Organic Groups (a heavy solution?), or more likely Taxonomy Access module. However, Ann seemed to indicate it was a custom solution programmed by ImageX, using Drupal. It would be more appropriate to actually ask ImageX directly how they approached this administrative separation.

ImageX was on budget, and they built NPC's site from the ground up; a complete rebuild. Their site was in need of that, because the old site was a mess. Most of their NPC's collaboration with ImageX was done through telephone calls and Base Camp. ImageX made a visit a year into the project.

The backend is run through the I.T. department, but Ann's office, the office of communications, manages the website, and Ann used Jing to create screencast tutorials for training staff on how to administer the website.

They are just now beginning to set up the Program, Department and Division pages, and she will work with the departments to provide some access control for managing content, as needed.

Sounds like NPC is quite happy with what they have, and their site looks great.

Ann Hess, Director of Marketing and Public Relations, can be reached by phone at 928-536-6257, and is located at the Silver Creek Campus in Snowflake, Arizona.

posted by Phil

Large Scale Drupal Deployment Made Easier with Aegir

Deploying and upgrading Drupal has become much easier with the maturing of a key piece of software called Aegir. Built using Drupal, Aegir allows complex Drupal configurations to be easily deployed and migrated using a smart graphical interface, and also allows smart command line integration using Drush (Drupal Shell). An early demonstration of its capabilities can be seen in this video.

Other software packages such as Eclipse and Dreamweaver include profiles or plugins to speed development and ease management of Drupal packages.

Add in your favorite developer tools such as SVN, Eclipse, Git, and you'll be all set.

Drupal a Visionary in Gartner's Social Software Magic Quadrant

In November 2009, analysts from Gartner added Drupal to the the 'Visionaries' section of Gartner's Magic Quadrant. This moves Drupal from a Niche Player into the Visionaries quadrant because its open source model drives adoption and popularity, as well as services such as Acquia providing enterprise support.

This places Drupal next to Google and other big social software players in workplace. Drupal's place is not just a number on a graph, however. It has seen adoption by some very big players, including its recent debut running the White House's website. The White House New Media team can be seen discussing the White House implementation at lullabot.com, where they give more information about what was involved in the project.

Drupal has also seen college-wide adoption among educational institutions and universities such as Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Amherst College, and many others, including Educause. Portland State University classifies their website as an enterprise system, as their website currently runs over 120 departments using Drupal.

With features such as RDFa, OpenID, and nearly anything else you can imagine among its 4,400 modules, Drupal is definitely reaching for the stars.