New CECS website goes live
The new College website went live today, 18 January 2010, after many months of hard work involving several College staff in IT, Marketing, Student Services, and ANU Photography, as well as University staff in the Marketing Office.
"I would like to personally thank everyone for all their help and support, and particularly Matt Gray in the IT team," said Heather McEwen, Marketing Manager. Ms McEwen managed the project that began way back in 2009 and which weathered the storms of continuing change management, and the introduction of new ANU guidelines part way through the project.
"That kind of threw the cat in amongst the pigeons," she said as the College had already reached the stage of having new design concepts created by design studio, Graphic Ark, and didn't want to waste resources already invested in that.
"Happily ANU Marketing understood where we were coming from and worked with us to satisfy their mandate for consistency and editorial style, while allowing us some flexibility to accommodate our own needs, and the resources we'd already put into it," she said.
"We have created new databases to capture information like research projects for summer scholars and fine-tuned areas like our people database to make it easier for future HDR students to find potential supervisors and research groups," said Ms McEwen.
"We have also created a database for stories to highlight the great work that our staff and students are involved in, as well as turning all our ANU Reporter and On Campus stories into a segment we call 'Spotlight' so that we can widen the readership of these stories online," she said.
Ms McEwen said that the cheerful and professional assistance and advice provided by the ANU Web Transformation Group, even when the going got tough, and the School of Computer Science web working group had been invaluable to the project.
"There is still much to do, including finalising the school pages, creating an alumni presence, and providing assistance to our research groups in creating their own pages," said Ms McEwen. "The challenge will be to keep the website current, and we will be forming a small web working group to assist with its maintenance, including a quarterly audit of all our web pages."
Other plans include creating audio and visual materials to enrich the content.
