When is the last time you updated your website content or photos? From your Facebook page to your department website, change is challenging. So when the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) looked at their five-year old website and determined it needed a make-over, they called in the local experts: Public Affairs and IT’s Web Services. “Public Affairs came up with a really great design,” enthused Kate Cross, Assistant Dean for GPS. “The responsive design works on mobile devices – just change the size of your web browser to see how it flows to fit the size of the screen. They had so many great ideas–most of the features you see came from them.”
Michelle Buchanan, the Graduate Studies Coordinator, is the heavy hitter when it comes to content management in GPS. By pulling existing content from the old website and searching Public Affairs Flickr site for professional images, Michelle was able to easily build out the new web pages. “I arrived at Rice and Arnaud Chevallier [Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Graduate Studies] had dreamed up a new website because the old one was not geared at all towards applicants,” recalled Buchanan. The look was dated, compared to peer graduate school’s websites, and it had big blocks of text on every page. “The 1-2-3 idea was one of our favorite aspects of the Jones School’s website,” said Buchanan. “We have a single application process, but every program has a slightly different application aspect and its own juries. So we took our notes, our peer research and our requirements for the application process to Public Affairs where Sean Rieger, Rachel Foster and Jennifer Ongoco listened to us and looked at the designs we liked, and got to work.”
Michelle Buchanan (right), GPS Coordinator, worked with Michael Harrison (left) of Web Services to update their department’s website.
When the designs were complete, Public Affairs built out the pages in HTML using responsive design elements, and handed off a file for GPS to present to a web developer to build out the full site. “We’ve worked with Web Services on several other projects – including the GradAdmit application system and the Hooding registration site – and have a good relationship with the team,” Cross explained. “We briefly thought about using someone else [to build out the site], but came back to Web Services because at the end of the day, it’s really nice to have someone next door.”
Once a proposal with Web Services was negotiated, Michael Harrison was the liaison between customer and the outsource agency who built out the website. “When the outsource company was finished, Michael helped me fix the little things they missed,” said Buchanan.