Health and Wellness move to Omni/WordPress
Earlier this year, we launched a brand new web presence for the Health and Wellness division, which is comprised of four departments: Health Plus, Occupational Health Clinic, Work/Life Connections and the Child and Family Center. Previously five separate websites — we merged the four internal department sites into the overall Health and Wellness site — creating a more unified look and feel throughout the divisional sites. Now each department has a “microsite” within the main HW website. This helps further elevate the “brand” of the main division — it’s now clear that all of these services fall under the Heath and Wellness division.
We migrated all of their content from a SharePoint instance into a combined OmniUpdate and WordPress site. The department pages are maintained within OmniUpdate. All news, wellcast podcasts and resources articles are housed within WordPress. Because these two systems work so well together — you can’t tell just from looking what is powering any particular page. The WP and OU templates share layout and navigation files seamlessly.
A major change for the entire division was moving to using the University Calendar for ALL of their events. As you can imagine — there are A LOT of events going on between these four areas. The fitness classes alone for Health Plus were easily a hundred or more per month. Now — all events for HW are centrally managed in the University Calendar. Through tags, we are able to pull specific listings of events onto various sections of the site. And the site maintainers can easily display a listing of VERY specific events within any page using the same tagging capabilities. (For an example of how this functionality has vastly improved the workflow in HW. Previously the staff would upload a PDF once a week or so of all the dates, times and locations for flu shots. Now — they simply can embed a listing of all of those events into the page and it automatically displays the most current listing of locations. No extra steps. Enter the event once into the calendar — and they’re done!)
The staff sections of the site are all powered by a simple mysql database — and we provide easy WYSIWYG backend interface for maintainers to add, remove and categorize staff. Each staff member has their own contact page on the site, protected from spam by a CAPTCHA. This allows their email address to never be revealed directly to users.
It was a pleasure to work with Glen Harness, Stacey Kendrick and Paula McGown on this project. They truly are passionate about their work — and want to provide the best service possible to the Vanderbilt community through Health and Wellness.
June 5th, 2012
The new site looks great! When I was in college I did some work for the Health & Wellness center on campus, so this project brings back fond memories :) (of course, our project wasn’t as sophisticated as this one!)nnnI have recently started using WordPress as well and am very impressed with the interface and how easy it is to setup and configure (for someone without a lot of technical experience, it’s great!)nnnNice work Lacy!