School of Engineering now powered by WordPress and Omni
Earlier this fall, the School of Engineering launched their new web presence powered by OmniUpdate and WordPress. As part of the move to OU and WP, we also rolled our a brand new look for their site — with a cleaner, streamlined look, simplified navigation. Their homepage includes easily editable content blocks for featured stories in the slideshow, news/announcements, and a mini-slideshow highlighting all of their departments. We also tuned our Google Search Appliance for the SoE site — adding in lots of keymatches for all their programs and faculty members. This greatly improves the user experience by getting them to the content they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
Still in progress are migrating all of their faculty profiles and departmental faculty listings from statically maintained pages into a database. Some sections are already powered by the faculty database — and others are still showing static pages. Eventually the database powered pages will completely replace the static pages — making updates a one step process that will affect all pages related to the faculty member.
The majority of the SoE site is powered by OmniUpdate — with news being handled by WordPress and events by the University Calendar. On any given departmental page — in the right column you will see news and events specific to that department (filtered by tags in WP/Calendar).
We worked closely with the Engineering communications team on this project (Christopher Rowe, Brenda Ellis, Craig Fields, Marian Eichelman Matthis and Becky Green). They maintain all content now that the site has gone live.