Dear Colleagues,
Our shared strategic objective to deliver a high-quality OneNAU website that is mobile friendly, accessibility compliant, and reflective of the vibrancy and vitality of our NAU community continues to move forward. Thank you to everyone for your excellent and impactful work on this transformation over the past 15 months. Information on the institution’s progress can be found at https://in.nau.edu/web/site-migration-scorecard/. This communication clarifies our current efforts and identifies key activities that will occur between now and the opening of the Fall 2018 semester.
Public Audience Web Site WWW
Our public-facing website project (WWW) is focused on a OneNAU growth strategy, which includes continued work on prospective student pathways for recruitment, college and program specific content, thought leadership presence, public-facing news, and other marketing initiatives to serve all our audiences and University initiatives.
The WWW project continues in three parallel tracks:
- do-it-yourself in which departments are responsible for developing and publishing all content;
- ITS assisted tracks in which ITS provides content migration assistance; and
- Contracted – departments pay for site development. University Marketing will continue to utilize marketing consultants, Lipman Hearne, to provide marketing strategy and information architecture and will continue to work with department units post migration to rework their web content to the new WWW website strategy. Contact Ashley Chitwood, Chief Marketing Officer, for information about this contracted method.
Internal Audience Web Site
A project is also underway to identify and properly structure internal audience oriented web content for current faculty, staff, students. Sometimes referred to as an “intranet”, this internal-facing web site will provide information in support of the current NAU community audiences and improve access to functional aspects while keeping our external WWW messaging succinct and clear. Marketing and ITS are actively involved in supporting this effort.
To assist in a rapid migration of this internal oriented web content from Ektron™ to WordPress™, ITS has engaged a service company named WordHerd™ and the CIO has established a deadline of August 1, 2018 to complete the migration of the internal-facing pages to avoid increased risk of failure of the aging Ektron™ server in time for the upcoming academic year. We anticipate, and departments should be prepared for, some minor editing/clean-up of WordHerd™ migrated content.
Resources & Coordination
Further communications and meetings on these initiatives will be provided to Unit Web Coordinators and Site Stewards, and additional information will be posted to the nau.edu/web website. WordPress™ training will be ongoing and workshops for editing and creating web content are regularly scheduled to provide web editors with assistance. The WordPress™ users group will also remain very active in providing collegial exchanges around best practices and future capabilities. If you have any questions about methods, process, resources, or technology, please contact wcm-support@nau.edu.
Thank you for your continued support and engagement in this critically important project. Please share this message with others who need to know, can benefit from or contribute to our shared success. Finally, please call on me, Ashley or our staff in ITS and Marketing to answer any questions or address concerns as we move forward.
Most Appreciatively,
Steve Burrell
VP IT and CIO