Overview
One of my earliest projects at the Center for Health Research was to develop a new, public-facing website that is managed through a content management system. Upon completion of this website, it was requested by the Research Compliance department to have their own sub-site for publishing and managing content for public consumption. The content within the Research Compliance department’s previous website was hard to organize and manage using the older CMS, therefore leading an overgrowth of lightly managed content. In addition to the issue with the content, the Research Compliance department name had been recently changed and their website needed to match the design standards of the Center’s new public website.
Approach
Before creating the new sub-site and migrating the content over, it was understood that a new information architecture would be needed for it to be navigable. To do this, the older content needed to be reviewed, updated, authorized, and categorized. This was done by creating a comprehensive content inventory and concept map to review with the stakeholders. Following this collaborative effort, an information architecture was constructed in the form of a sitemap to show how the content was to be organized within a hierarchy of webpages. Since the site was to utilize an established CMS and design scheme, I could quickly produce a more granular view of how the content would be displayed on the layout of the page through high-fidelity wireframes using Adobe Fireworks. Once the wireframe efforts and information architecture was approved by the project stakeholders, the site was implemented through the established CMS. This included the organization of content within the CMS, development of specialized layout templates, and responsive page creation.
Deliverables
- Content Inventory
- Information Architecture
- Wireframes
- CMS Manageable Public Website
Tools & Methods
- Visio
- Dot Net Nuke (DNN)
- Bootstrap 3
- HTML5/CSS3