Beginning research and first CSC meeting

As my Capstone project start progressing deep into the production process, I am beginning to feel a little more optimistic about getting every thing done and completed to the best of my ability. This week, I began to familiarize myself with Wordpress and participated in a few tutorials to guide me around the site. I also began looking at themes that I thought would best suit the new Shepherd Career Services site.

Not only have I worked with Wordpress, but I thought it would also be important to look at other college’s career development sites to not only gain inspiration, but also know what I did not want in my site. Many of the college career sites are already set up close to the current Shepherd website with room for improvement. But then I saw one Career Services site that I believe was done through Wordpress and the difference was absolutely noticeable. The Wordpress site was fresh and clean cut, and also easy to navigate, which are keystone themes for Wordpress anyway. Some of the themes that I am considering are:

-Splendio

-Academica

-Oxygen

Of these, I am leaning towards Splendio, but it is still too early to make a final decision, I want to explore putting some of the content into each of the demos before I make a final say on what theme I want to use.

On Thursday, I met with Victoria Buchbauer, head of the department of Career Services at Shepherd. We hit it off right right away and from the moment I met her, I could  tell how passionate she is about her department. Her commitment and enthusiasm was immediately inspiring. She explained that she wanted a website that was not only functional, but fun. She wanted something that was going to interest all audiences, be easily accesible, and display all their information is a visually interesting and intuitive manner. At the minute, Victoria informed me that they don't have a very active social media area of their department, something that I thought that I might work on as well. I think that I can integrate the social media into the website. It was also important for Victoria and her office assistant Jamie to understand and know how to use the Wordpress system, so I want to make a big part of my project user testing and making sure that they know how to edit and update the content. Another issue that I found with the current website was the lack of intuitive navigation and content distribution and layout.  

This weekend I am working on writing up an official client analysis of a more detailed assessment of the changes and needs of the current Shepherd website, as well as mapping out the old Shepherd website, so I can see what is the depth of the navigation and why it isn't working as is, and how I can change it in the new site.