Content Management System puts faculty and staff
in the Web driver’s seat

Whether we realize it or not, we’re all conditioned to expect quick responses to our wants and needs. Short on cash? Press a few ATM buttons and you’re in the money. Hungry? Dinner’s just a drive-through away. Picking up a few things at the market? The express lane is practically calling your name.

With the advent of CCBC’s new Content Management System (CMS), faculty and staff responsible for updating college Web pages can count on the same sort of instant gratification we’ve come to expect elsewhere in our lives. While not quite as fast as microwaving popcorn, it’s pretty darn close.

The premise of CMS is deceivingly simple: divisions, departments and programs are now capable of and responsible for editing their own Web pages, utilizing standardized templates and establishing their own internal approval systems. The nuts-and-bolts reality behind the creation of CMS, however, is a bit more complex.

“About three years ago IT [Information Technology] started looking at new alternatives to managing CCBC’s Web site,” said Ron Heacock, vice chancellor for Technology and Planning at CCBC. “It had become a huge collection of static pages, and was still growing. The platform had reached the end of its useful life, and IT’s job was to design and build a new one,” he said.

As is true with just about anything in the field of Information Technology, Heacock explained, the project took a full year to research. Creating a business plan occupied the next 12 months, while actually building the system took another year. “It may seem like a long time in coming,” said Heacock, “but if we had gone down the wrong road, it would have been an extremely expensive mistake.”

The task of actually making the CMS concept a reality fell to CCBC’s Web Management department. “We talked to faculty and staff throughout the college and asked them what they would want CMS to do,” said Vicki Lesko, CCBC Webmaster. “Members of the original Web Team – from various areas throughout IT and Public Relations – brainstormed and created what became our CMS wish list,” she explained. “Our ultimate goal was to find a way for users to update Web pages themselves without having to learn a complicated Web authority tool like Dreamweaver or HTML [hypertext markup language].”

Department staff then researched Web management products currently available on the market. They soon came to the realization that CCBC already had the talent and expertise in-house to create a custom system, better suited to CCBC’s needs than any of-the-shelf product. “After speaking with some consultants for direction, we created the flow of how to move through the system and wrote all of the code ourselves,” said Eliot Pearson, Web programmer.

Tim Dobrowolsky, systems engineer, Chris Hayen, systems engineering assistant, Madeline Kuehne, programmer/analyst, Jason Redding, Web programmer, and Mike Yurche, programmer/analyst, worked with Pearson to write the voluminous lines of code necessary to construct CMS. Lesko teamed with Jodi Ceglia, senior graphic designer, Lisa Hetrick, director of Marketing Communications, and Joy Mohan, Web specialist, to create the design, usability features and templates for the new Web pages.

CMS is considered a “work in progress,” according to Pearson. “Some issues didn’t surface until users actually came online, but now we’re at the point where we can find the bugs and fix them before the end users even know they’re there.”

And the number of those end users continues to grow. “We are initially looking at 10 to 20 percent of CCBC employees as users,” said Lesko. “Each user could be responsible for anywhere from three to 300 pages.” Ultimately, faculty and staff will be responsible for about 90 percent of the 3,000+ pages on the CCBC Web site. Lesko reports that there are now approximately 30 employees actually using CMS to create and edit Web pages.

One of those users is Pam Pettingill, system support manager in the Finance department. With no prior experience in Web design or content management, Pettingill attended one of the training sessions offered in recent weeks by CCBC’s Technology Training Institute (TTI). “CMS is actually very simple to use,” she said. “It’s extremely user-friendly. The few times I’ve had a problem, I just called someone in Web Management or TTI and they walked me through it.”

The best features of CMS, according to Pettingill, are content control and quick turnaround for updates. “We’re responsible for our own content, so as soon as we see something that needs to be changed, we just do it ourselves. The approvals are quick and the new information is up on the Web almost immediately ” Pettingill said. “I’m very impressed by it.”

Melita Lykiardopoulou, coordinator of Web based projects for Continuing Education, is another satisfied CMS customer. “It’s given new meaning to life around here,” she said. “I’m thrilled with it.” Lykiardopoulou appreciates the planning that went into creating CMS, and particularly likes the guidelines and system safeguards in place.

“The templates eliminate decisions and discussions about colors, fonts and layouts,” Lykiardopoulou said. “It makes the process much faster, both in creating the pages and moving through the approval process.”

Departments and programs determine their own approval structures and can designate as many writers as they deem necessary. Lesko assists each group in establishing an approval organization and setting up access permissions for writers, editors and page approvers. While users have ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of their pages, all information still funnels through Lesko’s office before it becomes live on the Web site. “Even so, the process is much simplified and quite a bit faster on our end,” Lesko noted.

“The system is so efficient now, it’s like day and night compared how we used to operate,” she said. “It’s very exciting, both for us and for the users.”