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We recently launched a redesign of the Academic Senate website (opens new window).

The previous site was a framed website and managed by hand. Since the site isn't overly complex that workflow was efficient for a long time. There were a few barriers to that approach, though, and the Academic Senate came to us for help with a solution.

What we came up with is a fully responsive website managed through the university's central CMS and automatically pulls in data from across campus. A few key features of the new site include:

Built on Foundation 5

As we evolve our responsive approach we have settled on Zurb's Foundation framework (opens new window). It is light weight, flexible and allows us to extend it where needed without having it feel like a "Bootstrap" site.

Membership lists using CMS profiles

A big part of the Academic Senate website is broken down into committees and related information. Since the membership of these committees changes over time, and people can be on multiple committees, managing this information can be cumbersome. We transitioned each member into the "profiles" area of the CMS where they can be associated with multiple committees if needed and the information can be managed by the people themselves or by the Academic Senate staff with just a Web browser. They can be updated once and published across the site.

Profile images and content pulling from existing sites

Almost all Academic Senate members already have existing profiles on their school/college/department websites. We didn't want to duplicate this information so we pull their existing profile information to reduce redundancy. When the member updates their profile, it will automatically update on the Academic Senate website.

Under the hood

A few things you won't notice is we are standardizing our build process with new sites. We have a Yeoman site generator (opens new window) that we use as a base for each project. Next, we're using Grunt (opens new window) (soon to use Gulp (opens new window)) as our "build" step to check and compile all assets into their appropriate folders. This not only reduces the initial project build time but also separates source files from their rendered machine optimized results. On that same spirit we have begun to deploy sites in a standard way to speed up the process and reduce the possibility for mistakes.

View the new Academic Senate website at: http://academicsenate.wayne.edu/ (opens new window)