Posts tagged `design`

This entry pertains to work done in the context of my employment. Please remember, however, that any opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or co-workers.

The Problem

Admissions needed help. They had been moved from their former product, Exeter, to Banner’s native admissions module. But Banner’s interface stinks, and there was no decent way for counselors to do, well, anything. They relied on daily reports run out of an Excel pivot table by the executive directory of admissions, and therefore they lived on paper. The counselors needed a better way to get their work done and stay on top (figuratively speaking) of their recruits.

Enter my department. It fell to us, after some discussion, to build a tool that would be initial for undergraduate counselors, to let them slice and dice their data as needed. After a pilot run, it will gradually be expanded to include graduate and transfer admissions, as well as reporting tools for directors and and other muckity-mucks.

Read more…

§2354 · September 11, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , , , ,

Wordpress

After 6+ months of steady development, WordPress 2.5 has finally been released, with a number of new features, including a media library and the first administration panel redesign since 2.0.

In addition, the main WordPress website has been redesigned to match.

Congratulations to all the hackers, testers, and volunteers who helped it happen.

§2026 · March 29, 2008 · 2 comments · Tags: , , , ,

For those of you unaware, I work (as a student, sadly) in the Web Services Dept. of the University of St. Francis. It’s a nice job, really.

Alas, we’re a small school, and still pretty stupid about some things. A laundry list of all of them (even those limited to the technological) would be beyond the scope of this post. One thing in which we’re stupid is our website, which is sprawling (the faculty tend to use the web server for storage instead of their network drive) and not database driven. We’re moving to a portal system in January ’06 (tentative), but we’ll still have a lot of the current site.

Therein lies one of my biggest problems: instead of pulling content dynamically and running it through some CSS, we’re still using crufty, hardcoded pages and the horrible, byzantine templating system of Dreamweaver.

Until summer of 2004, we were on a template created entirely by Adobe GoLive. Why anyone was ever allowed to use such a miserable program is completely beyond me: it filled the code with GoLive “actions”: in other words, proprietary markup similar to what Microsoft does with its created HTML files.

But I’m not going to talk about the template per se, because I have yet to tinker with that. I am, however, going to talk about the home page, which in many respects is far more important. Read more…

§801 · October 16, 2005 · 7 comments · Tags: , , , , ,