In June, I wrote about little bits of joy, with our web migration. Today, we reached a major milestone in this once in an institutional lifetime migration: our new homepage is live!
As I noted before, this is a huge deal because of the technical issues: The Libraries at UF have been super webby since the 1990s, and we have never had a full content management system or a completed migration. We have pages that are very, very old, and the information architecture just wasn’t there. I was hoping for a first-pass for a minimum viable product of:
- Clean-up/removal of hundreds of old pages that weren’t needed (and many not accurate or even applicable)
- Main pages/site in place in WordPress (for mobile responsive, accessibility compliant, basic information architecture)
- Doing this work to get our content creating partners used to WordPress and enabled for their work
- Plan for next phases
The Web Team is a fantastic crew, and they wanted more and they did all of the MVP and more, adding new pages that provide information that did not exist prior (like inclusive spaces), really thinking through and putting in place a full information architecture, and doing this while also releasing event sites (fall fest), updating for new services (like people counters), and so much more!
Now, today we get to rejoice at a major milestone with the homebase of the Libraries’ sites live, and with the branches (most outwardly facing) of our sites live.
Next week, we’ll update the plans for the rest of the semester and communicate that to core partners to ensure we’re all on the same collabroative path. The migration was complicated from the start with so much technical debt, and socio-technical debt with partners not positioned for their work and for learning how to do web work and where it fits. We’re through that major push, and now our mass of complications is much smaller. I love working with passionate people who do great work! We want to continue the excitement and enthusiam, and we want to do it in sustainable and truly joyous ways where we all communicate together to have fair and liveable working conditions for workers, where we set expectations and communicate for shared goals and timelines, so that we can all enjoy the joy together! I’m super duper excited to post on next steps as this continues to roll out!