So the site I've been losing sleep over for the past couple of weeks months is finally up. I had set a deadline for the beginning of the year and, by golly, I made it -- even if the thing kind of put a damper on my holiday activities: http://oar.uic.edu
Contrary to a lot of the stuff I've been doing recently, this project didn't focus on CMS's. In fact the goal was to develop a new 'template' for the Dreamweaver/Contribute-based system that they use at UIC's Office of Admissions & Records (OAR). This allowed me to focus a bit more on the visual or graphic end of things -- creating a new template out of whole cloth rather than grabbing something ready-made and adapting that, with an image here and an image there, to my own needs.
Of course, when you're developing something for a large public institution, it not only has to look good but the code has to validate (natch); it also has to run on everything from the latest version of Safari and Chrome to the horrifyingly antiquated IE6. Equally important, the site has to be accessibility-friendly -- meeting and (at least for stuff I do) hopefully exceeding both guidelines in general and those more specific to Illinois (i.e. IITAA).
So it's done. The initial release will be followed up by a couple of studies I want to do on our stats (thank you Google Analytics), plus interviews and focus groups with our staff and user base.
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