WebLion assists College of Agricultural Sciences with massive Web redesign project

Chris More, associate director of Web communications with the College of Agricultural Sciences, had a monster of a project on his plate -- enhance and consolidate the 300 separate Web sites, which included a half-million pages.

Besides the sheer volume of work, More also faced other challenges. For example, many of the sites had static pages. He wanted to update them to include more dynamic content such as blogs, videos, and other Web 2.0 functions. He needed the right Web content management system to help him do the job quickly and efficiently.

After reviewing some commercial vendors, More settled on Penn State’s Web content management system team, WebLion, to assist with the project. WebLion is an initiative to provide add-on products, consulting, training, and community around the Plone content management system at Penn State.

“Initially, I looked at the tool we were historically using, RedDot, which is a commercial tool using Microsoft-based technologies,” More said. “I investigated RedDot and felt that it was very much like an enterprise-level tool as it is very complex.  I initially thought the tool would be sufficient for our needs.”

However, More ran into issues with RedDot. “We worked with RedDot for an additional three months and found out that it could not handle any dynamic features easily. Simple features that all Web sites should be able to do were almost impossible with RedDot.” he said.

RedDot was also expensive and closed source, so More looked at open source tools. “It really came down to Drupal, Plone, and a few others,” he said. “Plone seemed complex but it had all the built-in functionality to meet our needs. I looked at Drupal and I thought it may be simpler than Plone and also had numerous features that would benefit our College.”

More decided to go with Plone. “The decision of going with Plone was really because of the WebLion staff,” he said. “Having people behind the project who were very knowledgeable of the tool and very Web savvy was the deciding factor. Also, Plone is free and where the WebLion team is going with the tool is great.”

More knew that he was facing a major challenge with the redesign and implementation. Not only does the College of Agricultural Sciences have about 300 Websites and about a half-million pages, they are all very fragmented and separate. “We have 300 separate URLs which is way too many URLs for a college or any organization. We wanted to use Plone and WebLion to bring all those sites together into a smaller amount of feature-rich sites as opposed to more numerous smaller sites,” he said.

Working with WebLion, More launched the first redesigned Web site December 2008, the Department of Food Science. Food Science was first, More said, because they requested the redesign and because he needed a “guinea pig.” “We knew that once we would show that Food Science’s Web presence be successful can be with Plone, we can replicate it with the rest of the units.” he said.

The project took about 4 months to complete and the launch was a success, More said. The site was even praised by individuals outside of Penn State. “When we launched, we got a comment from Alexander Limi, co-founder of Plone, saying he liked the Food Science site and that we did a good job,” he said. “The WebLion guys said he almost never says anything, so we felt maybe we were on the right track. We knew we could do even better sites, but the focus was to get the whole College on a level playing field to start.”

Right now, More said they are on Phase I of the projects. He said this involves getting all the academic unit sites on board with Plone and out of Dreamweaver or RedDot. The goal, he said, was to focus on sites related to enrollment. “So far, we have Food Science, the College homepage, and Entomology in Plone, and most of the other academic units are in our project queue,” he said. “Because we have so many projects, we are focusing on just getting them into Plone as fast as possible even though they may not be 100 percent perfect. Phase I is just about getting the whole College on a single platform. Phase II will be where the real fun happens.”

More said Plone and WebLion have helped the College of Agricultural Sciences create Websites that are dynamic, as opposed to the static sites the College has had in the past. “We like the idea of having a dynamic Web site, no longer is the content only on your Web site,” he said. “We now can pull a blog RSS feed from another Web site, or pull from Flickr or Youtube to put photos and videos on the sites automatically. User generated content and Web 2.0 is taking communications to a whole new level.”

When More and his team would run into issues, he said the WebLion team is always there to offer fast help. “When you have a problem, you login on the WebLion IRC channel and ask the question,” he said. “And usually seconds to minutes later, someone gives you an answer or at least points you in the right direction.

“Also, one thing I like, people think we are just working on wikis or chatting back and forth to each other and you are not really physically talking to anyone. In reality, they often will say ‘stop down at the office we will work through it together.’ So, we really like the idea of having them work with us and they bring expert level knowledge to the table. We rarely throw anything at them where they are saying ‘we never did that before.’ They are like an extended team, and they never act condescending to people at different skill levels, they are just there to help.”

For a Phase II of this giant project, More said they plan to do some additional usability testing, enhancing the structure of content and info, and adding some more features to the site. He added that they may have more blogs and wikis directly within the site, as opposed to pulling in content via RSS. However, he said that is in the future.

“Right now, with WebLion’s help, we are focused on making the site look better for prospective students,” More said. “That’s our number one goal. We want to assist in keeping enrollment steady or going up, which helps fund the College and our research.”