Redesign status update

Been a while since we last rapped at ya.

It's not because we haven't been busy. Quite the opposite. We reached a point in November where it was time to cease prototyping our redesign at our /beta site and begin implementing the design on our development server. Unfortunately, it's much more difficult to make our work visible to you when we're working on our development server. We've been giving demos to the Web Presence Management Group, but seeing as how we're a little over a week from our launch date, it seemed only right to provide a more public picture of where we're at.

The biggest challenge we've had in the past couple of months has been to graft our speedy hand-crafted prototype design onto our Drupal 6 CMS. Drupal serves us well as a system for delegating content creation and maintenance, but speedy it ain't. We ended up with a hybrid solution. Our home page remains largely bespoke code, using many of the latest and greatest tricks to speed load times and optimize performance across devices. We leverage Drupal only on secondary pages, where we've created a custom theme using the same assets, styles, scripts, and responsive design logic as our home page.

In effect, we've gained remarkable speed on our home page, but have lost the ability to use Drupal to publish content to the home page. Instead, we're building the home page by hand, and using some clever asynchronous publishing to get current info like hours and workshops onto the home page without bootstrapping Drupal. We feel strongly that these tradeoffs are worthwhile. Over 50% of pageviews on our site are of our home page. The next most-frequently viewed page garners just two percent of page views, and it's the default browser home page in most of our computer labs. Minute improvements to the home page, fractions of a second, can accumulate into huge gains for our users. If our home page had loaded a half-second faster, we would have saved our users over 135 hours over the course of fall semester 2013. We're hoping to meet or exceed this savings with the redesigned site in spring semester 2014.

But what about those secondary pages? The ones driven by Drupal? They're looking pretty great. We've completely restyled our subject guides and our A-Z list for greater scan-ability, and to be touch-friendly. Along the way, we've simplified More Info pages for electronic resources, and accounted for changes as a result of our move from Aleph to Alma, and from MNCAT Classic to MNCAT Discovery. We'll have even more to show you soon.