Selected pages go live on new UAA website platform, OU Campus
by Kathleen McCoy |
How the OU Campus web platform will display UAA sites on a smartphone, a tablet and a desktop. This is called responsive design. Read more about it at www.uaa.alaska.edu/new-website.
UAA's new content management system took a quiet bow this weekend when several universal sections went live: the online directory, the A-Z, the search box, and the contact UAA page.
Two university administrative sites, Administrative Services and Information Technology Services, also flipped into the new system.
Just as a reminder, this is a yearlong process of moving UAA's website content from the current CommonSpot content management system (never intended to serve a university as big and complex as UAA) to OU Campus, a leader in higher education websites.
Colleges migrate this semester; administrative departments migrate in the spring semester. Web leaders in your areas are already working with the project team, or getting ready to work with them soon.
During pre-migration meetings with the project team, departments can decide to have IT Services simply transfer all their material into the new system, without the site going public yet. Site owners can clean up and revamp their sites in the new system and then decide when they are ready to go live with their new OU Campus site. Their old CommonSpot site will remain publicly visible and usable until they make the switch. All units need to make the switch by the end of this fiscal year.
One of the coolest features of the new content platform is its responsive design. That means it scales appropriately for best viewing on a smart phone, a tablet, or a full-size desktop computer. You can test it yourself by comparing Administrative Services on your desktop computer, and then calling it up on a tablet or smartphone.
This is an important user-centered upgrade for increasingly mobile audiences. (Our current website displays as a traditional website, even on your tiny smartphone screen, making it very hard to navigate.)
A change that is important to share is that UAA will no longer produce a paper phone directory, a savings of $25,000 and a lot of paper! Another change is that UAA in complying with a White House best-practices initiative for government websites to be secure. UAA's addition of load-balancing servers has made this possible. Now, whenever you are on a UAA website, you are on a secure site and your sign on information is also secure. Read about the White House initiative here.
Stay in touch with the latest news on the new website migration at the project site here. Find FAQs on the new platform and migration project here. Your questions are welcome here.
"Selected pages go live on new UAA website platform, OU Campus" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.