About This Site
Help Desk very happily updated our aging website over the summer 2006. Our top priorities were: improved usability, content overhaul, and content management.
Accessibility & User Interface
The previous site design suffered from unintuitive navigation, cluttered design, poor search reults, and no facility for narrowing the content presented. Help Desk designed the new site to be simple and straightforward. We settled on WordPress blogging software as the back end, heavily modified and administered by Emily Sharp. WordPress allows non-hierarchical categorization of content. Articles can be classified under both “printing” and “labs”, for example, so that you can find how to print in the computer lab by looking for either topic. The built-in search is also much better than our previous solution.
Content
We used search statistics, customer service experience, and user feedback to determine the most important content areas. Reviewing the previous site, we determined which content could be reused and which would have to be written fresh. Based on these content areas, we tagged the articles on the new site, allowing the database to generate the topic list dynamically. Also using tags, we allowed users to narrow the content presented to them depending on whether they are students, faculty, or staff, or whether they are looking for a specific fix or more general information.
Maintenance
The other major advantage of blogging/CMS systems is that it is very easy to edit and add content directly in a web browser. Instead of having to update the site navigation to include links to the new content, we just tag it according to its content and it comes up. We can see a list of all articles on the site and determine where information is missing or duplicated.
Credits
Coding: Emily Sharp
Code tweaks and design/CMS integration: Emily Sharp
Content editors and writers: Help Desk Staff
Editor in Chief: Jesus Ayala
Manager: Jesus Ayala
Director: Sha Fagan
Thanks to all the site users! We welcome and appreciate your comments, questions, and concerns – please contact us.
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Copyright Notice
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.