New Gallaudet Website Feedback Participation

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Experience the “soft launch” of our new Gallaudet website.

We are pleased to announce the “soft launch” of our new Gallaudet website, and we are so proud of what is emerging. It represents the very best of Gallaudet.*

Visit the new website
Visit the new website
Important Good-to-Knows While Reviewing the New Website
Important Good-to-Knows While Reviewing the New Website:

This is a demonstration website, which means it is not yet “live” for the public to see. Over the next few weeks, the website will transform into a highly functional, data-driven “smart” website, with a 100% custom design. Over 8,000 pages of content from gallaudet.edu, my.gallaudet.edu, and third-party sites are being reorganized into the new site, creating close to 100 custom written and designed landing pages. We’re sharing just a few pages from the new site with you today for demonstration purposes only.

This work is tremendously complex. oughly 5,200 (65%) of the current pages on the Gallaudet website belong to Academic Affairs. The current restructuring of the five schools has impacted the migration process. In most cases, however, we are close to completion (i.e., our backend engineering is almost complete!), and we are now moving new content to the new website.

Important Good-to-Knows While Reviewing the New Website:

As you review the new site, please keep in mind:

  1. The site is in its building phase. Think of it as a new house with some rooms still needing electrical, plumbing and drywall, while other rooms are ready for paint and finishing touches. The site will continue to evolve. However, we need your “home inspection” support in identifying the correct content and site bugs.
  2. Content is being edited and will be migrated in the coming weeks. These office/department pages you’re seeing now provide guidance on the overall website transformation.
  3. The website is designed to be responsive for all devices. Whether you’re viewing the site on a laptop, tablet or phone, the experience will be user friendly and engaging (the designs are gorgeous!).
    The site-wide search function isn’t perfect–yet–but it will be before we do our public launch.
  4. Use of the website may be slow during this developmental stage; rest assured, this will be resolved before the official launch.

What to Expect Next? Your Action Items?

Each division, department, unit, and other organizations on campus gets an office page. On that office page, services, personnel, news, events, FAQ, guidelines, programs and projects appear. We need a representative for each office–and one person may represent multiple offices.

If you love creating great content and/or crunching sheets, you’re our person! Help create Gallaudet’s new virtual school front.

Each office will receive a sheet with old URL’s mapped to the new site, and all offices will review, feedback and confirm.

To keep up to date and feedback on your page(s), use this form on the new website:OR

November Goals:

  1. Assign representatives for each office.
  2. *Complete the report review.
  3. Standby as we scrape the content into sheets that we edit and import in bulk.
  4. Check the content on the new site via links on an updated report—request fixes.

* We will do this work in batches: Offices and Services, Guidelines and FAQs, then News & Events, Testimonials, Programs & Projects, and finally, Resources.

December Goals:

  1. Repeat step #4 above for each batch, doing further edits until all content is final.
  2. Provide feedback on landing pages, which will be released with lots of bee-bee.
  3. Fully test and perfect the IC, and polish all landing pages.
  4. Relax and enjoy the holiday season!

January/February Goals

  1. LAUNCH!
  2. Release User Dashboard for the campus to edit profiles, and continue to suggest revisions.
  3. Grant some web authors access to manage their respective pages.

2021 Goals

Once all the information is streamlined, each office can re-expand and grow, with fresh, new bilingual, video and written content that showcases the value you bring to this campus.

With a data-driven, yet highly customizable website, the marketing team will be able to whip up an experience for your students, events, courses, and more! Quick turnaround time on rich, bilingual content shall become the new norm.

There are two types of content
There are two types of content
For the Data Nerds
For the Data Nerds

There are two types of content:

Both content types can be customized 100% and work together well. For example, we can add dynamic elements such as news posts from a specific category, a portfolio of projects belonging to one program, a list of services, a group of auto-scrolling testimonials– the possibilities are endless!– filled with data straight from the Information Center!

Information Center

Directory, offices/departments, schools, catalog, programs, projects, services, guidelines, resources and more. This is where most of us will maintain and manage our content. Think of this as your new home for your current webpage.

Learn More
Learn More

Landing Pages

Think of these as our marketing pages intended for visitors to “take actions.” . For example, the goal on the undergraduate Admissions page-,is to get prospects to apply. Or, on the Give page, we want donors to find causes they are passionate about and donate

Learn More
Learn More

Information Center (IC)
Capturing the Gallaudet ecosystem

While we are working on about 100 landing pages, all old website content is being migrated to the new the directory, programs, projects, services, guidelines, resources, and more.

How it Works
Look for the search icon on the top right corner wherever you are on the site.

Clicking the search icon will open the Information Center along with the search form.

When you visit an office or program page, you will see the menu on the sidebar “mirroring” the Information Center. This means that any resources added to the Resource Center that belong to the School of Graduate & Research Studies, for example, will show up in both the Research Center and on the office page. On the office page, the menu will intelligently detect resources and automatically display a “Resource” section.

In the example below, we see an office menu showing the default “About” section that is on all offices, a “Services” section and a “News & Events” section. If an office has no services, there will not be any “services” on the menu.

Translation: The new website offers a low-maintenance, low-hassle way for your office to manage its web presence!

Examples

  1. A school’s office page: STAMP: https://wordpress-467883-1508324.cloudwaysapps.com/science-technology-accessibility-mathematics-public-health-school/
  2. A division’s office page: EDI: https://wordpress-467883-1508324.cloudwaysapps.com/equity-diversity-inclusion-office/
  3. Catalog: https://wordpress-467883-1508324.cloudwaysapps.com/courses/

Landing pages
aka, Bee Bee pages

A bit of a deaf-bing word and internal term used by our web team: If you sign “decorate,” how do your lips move?

“Bee bee!”

On every page of the entire site, menus appear at the top and bottom In between those fixed menus, we now have the flexibility to create versatile designs while still being “smart,” For example, a special landing page may display a category of news and a list of courses under one subject, one that automatically updates itself as more news, events and courses are created. This “smart” feature keeps the page content fresh, updated and bee-bee (decorated) for years to come.

Our behind-the-scenes process for the landing pages is writing the copy and creating design mockups before developing. Most pages are currently written and about to be designed.

Examples

  1. Homepage: https://wordpress-467883-1508324.cloudwaysapps.com
  2. Leadership: https://wordpress-467883-1508324.cloudwaysapps.com/about/leadership/
  3. Global and National Research: https://wordpress-467883-1508324.cloudwaysapps.com/about/global-national-research/ 
        1.  

For the Data Nerds
Here are a few interesting statistics.

“Total Pages” are pages we’ve identified as belonging to a division, and “Unmapped” is the number of pages left for us to sort through.

 

Total Pages

Unmapped

All Divisions

80

4

Academic Affairs

5282

1787

Clerc Center

135

112

Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

61

8

*Finance Office

80

1

Operations

476

132

Student Affairs

262

11

President’s Office

196

121

Institutional Advancement

129

96

Bilingual Center

51

8

Marketing and UG Admissions and Outreach

1009

135

* Much of Finance’s content is within Operations, from the previous “Administration & Finance” division.

Where the pages we have mapped so far are going: We are at over 2,000 left and expect numbers below to increase proportionally:

Event

30

FAQs 

66

Guidelines

536

News 

1204

*Office

312

Staff Lists / Bios

175

Programs & Projects

733

Resource Collections 

26

Resources

1681

Services

148

*Static Pages

222

Testimonials

10

* Most offices and static pages contain content merged from multiple pages (312 pages were merged into 112 offices).

Below are from other sources we also extracted:

FAQs 

954

Personnel

1929

Research Projects

150

Testimonials

164