About a year ago, I started working for McNally Smith College of Music, a school in downtown St. Paul that specializes in contemporary music. When I first started, right at the beginning of 2011, a website redesign was already underway — the candidates had been narrowed down to one design group, Larsen, and information architecture was being laid out to determine the new site structure. As webmaster, I had some input on it, although for the most part the structure resembled our old site’s pretty closely.
In late February, we were pitched two design concepts. The first, “Musician’s Craft,” was grungy, with a dark background, lots of textures, graffiti, and images of angst-ridden/attitude-filled students. The second, a clear favorite, “Remix,” was much cleaner — white background, elegant type, and a prominent sliding banner featuring various students, instruments, and other music-related images. It was pretty unanimously voted for, and became the site that mcnallysmith.edu is today:
Obviously, it took us a long time to get to launch. The photo shoot at which we got pictures of the two guys you see above took place way back in last June. A lot of the summer was then spent developing images for banners for each of the academic pages, as well as new copy for each. Things really started to feel like they were coming together in October, when my boss Christian and I visited Larsen’s office to get trained on the CMS — WordPress (oh yeah, we were excited). It feels a lot like being a kid on Xmas morning: Something we’d been anxiously expecting for months had finally arrived, and we were about to be able to start playing with it. On the old site, we couldn’t even add new pages… OK, if I knew .NET, I could have, but I barely knew HTML and CSS when I started the job. Point is, even basic WordPress functionality far exceeded the capabilities of the old custom CMS on our site, and the new design alone was worth the switch (as it turns out, Larsen customized the WordPress CMS for our site… I’m amazed at what it can do).
That’s not to say that the process was without its pitfalls. Christian put a lot of time and effort into coordinating images for each department’s page with its respective department head — and the process required an additional photo shoot (or two). There were more than a few areas that I visited so rarely on the old site and had almost forgotten about that needed last-minute photos, copy, or updates for the new site. As always, communication could have been clearer across the board — between Christian, myself, Larsen, other members of the college, etc. And there were things that we didn’t anticipate: Needing to redirect every old url to a page on the old site, running into snafus with establishing database connections, tracking and fixing 404 errors… But in the end, I would call this project a success, and (if I may) a learning experience for myself. I found that it’s a tough position to be in, needing to please literally hundreds of internal members of your organization, taking control of a CMS and making alterations to the code while hopefully staying true to the agency’s creative vision, and (most importantly) beginning to define a set of web standards — copy, design, images, media, and more — that best present McNally Smith online.
So, here’s (again) to a new year, and to helping this website develop and grow. Visit mcnallysmith.edu for more.
