This morning we relaunched the university website with the cosmetic updates that we mentioned before the holidays. The two things that you’ll notice right away is the featuring of the social media buttons – in keeping with Marcomm’s emphasis on maintaining a national leadership role in social media – and the greater tie-in of the campus news section with TAMUtimes.

As well as these design updates, we have completely overhauled the template code and rewritten it in HTML5. This is the beginning of a trend that you will see in all of our new sites. We have also (finally!) gotten the site moved into the Cascade content management system. We have migrated a few sites into the CMS, but this one will be by far our largest and most complex. I’m hoping that we will have the rest of our sites put into the system by the end of the year.

Next on the list list is the president’s website. Kim Miller and Jenni Walthall are now leading the design team. We have come up with a preliminary page look, and hope to have it rolled out in a couple of weeks.

We are already feeling the effects of Jeff leaving. I would therefore like to let everyone know that we have opened his position through HR and are now taking applications.

You can see the official job notification (and apply, nudge nudge) at tamujobs.tamu.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=199272

In general terms this position will be our departmental lead programmer. We are looking for someone who can come in and take on large, highly public projects which affect the face of the university. In our rebuild we expect to also have a small team of junior programmers and student workers, so this person would also serve as mentor and be able to create a set of standards for the entire department.

You might recall that last month Stephanie Leary gave up the UWeb wiki website and that Marcomm agreed to rehost it.

There was a lot of old information on the site, and a lot that was no longer useful or relevant to TAMU webmasters today. We therefore decided to strip the site down to what we saw as the bare essentials, and reopen it for the campus community to recreate with content that is useful today.

My view of the site is that is should contain mostly campus-centric information that is of interest and use to TAMU webmasters, and not general information that can easily be found on the internet at large. Superseding this, though, I want to maintain the tradition of keeping this a vehicle for the web community, so we are opening it to anyone with a CAS login and allowing you to post whatever content you think is appropriate.

If anyone is particularly passionate about the site and would like to take on a more enhanced role in editing/maintaining it, please give us a call, we’ll be happy for the help.

As Erick mentioned today is my last day working with the Marketing & Communications team at Texas A&M. It has been my pleasure to help elevate Texas A&M’s web presence and data sources and I know that the team and each of you will continue to do so in my absence. There were significant steps forward in my tenure from 2009-2011 and I’ll be watching as those steps turn to leaps over the next few years.

I wish you all the best and much future success.

So long.

The last few months of 2011 saw some big changes in Marcomm as both John Chivvis and Eric Herbst left the Marketing team. Today, unfortunately, is Jeff Carouth’s last day as well. He is leaving us for the private sector, and while we will sorely miss him, we wish him the best.

That leaves us with several holes to fill and a project list that isn’t getting any shorter. Luckily, before the break we did get one position posted through HR – Web Communications Specialist, NOV #120471. This person is intended to be primarily a front-end engineer, with responsibilities of creating HTML/CSS templates, javascript-driven dynamic sites, Flash/Actionscript programming, working with graphics team on site design, etc.

As for projects, I expect we will be a bit slow until we can get the team back to full speed, but we have several exciting things on the horizon.

Last week we mentioned in Brand Council that we will be giving the university website a slight makeover soon. We don’t intend anything drastic, just a few cosmetic touchups that will increase visual appeal, strengthen the ties to university branding, and make the integration with the TAMUtimes website more apparent.

While we make these changes, we are also using the opportunity to make some behind-the-scene changes. The template base has been rewritten to HTML5. This will be our first site published in HTML5, but we intend to begin using it for all new development projects. While the changes are minor, I can already say that I love the change to a more semantically rich markup. I have also noticed that the change cut the length of our page styles by more than half.

We will also (finally!) be putting the new page code into the Cascade Server CMS. We have already moved a few smaller sites into the system, but we are now comfortable enough with the system that we can start adding our larger and more complex sites as well.

With luck, all of these updates should be complete and online by the beginning of the spring semester in January.

– I’m reposting this announcement for anyone how might have missed it. I highly encourage anyone in the IT community to show up for this one or catch the video stream.

The next IT Forum is December 14th at 3:00 p.m. in the Rudder 601. Dr. Pierce Cantrell, Dr. Walt Magnussen, Dr. Pete Marchbanks and Mr. Willis Marti will provide details of the incident and the upcoming repairs. The floor will then be opened for questions.

All campus members are invited to attend this special forum. Feel free to invite members of your department. A live broadcast will be available on http://ttvn.tamu.edu/Index.php?p=Streams on channel 20.

One of our big projects for next spring will be the publication of online virtual tours. We are currently partnering with the Office of Admissions and others to select a product.

One thing that we have been talking about is not limiting ourselves to whatever vendor product is chosen, but to surround that application with tour-related information of our own — panoramas and videos of buildings, campus maps, etc.

One of the potential items that was brought to our attention was tour sites that already exist within the various campus offices. We would definitely love to include these in the overall virtual tour site. If you have or know of an online tour site on campus, please send us a link so that we can consider it for inclusion.

Stephanie Leary posted to the uWeb listserv that she was going to need to pass the Uweb wiki along to someone else. We have agreed to take it over and continue hosting it so that the site/service/organization can continue to be of value to the campus web community.

One of the things we found was that the CAS login module is broken, so we need to secure that before putting anything back online. The site will therefore be empty for a short time, please bear with us.

Stephanie mentioned that she received many comments agreeing that most of the current content could be removed. I think this will be a good opportunity, then, to refresh the site and largely start over. I’ll be working up some basic content that can form the beginning of the new site, and when the authentication issue is worked out we will reopen it to the community to expand the site with new information.

With everything going on, I didn’t even notice until this morning that HighEdWeb is only a week away. Now to review the conference site, look over what tracks I want to attend, and start putting together a list of the people I need to track down. We have a short trip this year over to Austin – who else from campus is attending? Be sure to look me up while we’re there.

This year I am going just as a participant, no presenting. Jeff isn’t so lucky. He is at ZendCon right now and will be one of the feature presenters. Assuming he gets time off to sit in on the other presentations I look forward to more great ideas when we all get back together.