Multi-Page Setup
—An encapsulating template meant to be used for various setups such as news, job postings, and more.
Project Summary
This project’s purpose was to encapsulate as many uses as we could think of. Any setup that requires individual postings (ie. news, jobs, etc.) now goes through this dynamic setup. The posting pages are flexible, allowing multiple media and tags, and the listing pages can be set up into three separate views: news, stories, and table. On top of that, the listing page also has tremendous customization, allowing users to prioritize information.
Listing Page
This page setup consolidates all posting pages into a single, dynamic setup. The user can choose from three display types as well as prioritize posting pages. They can also customize a menu for filtering the listed posting pages.
Posting Page
The posting page is set up to allow for various use cases including: adding media, various styled links for slideshows, video overlays, etc., and tagging for use on the listing page.
Challenges
Conceptualizing a single, re-usable setup that could encapsulate many different use cases took the majority of the time. Members of our team went back and forth, hashing out a wireframe that could perform all tasks needed, but also be usable by anyone in the university. Programming would also present challenges, as something with this amount of flexibility was going to be complex.
Solutions
Iterations proved to be our friend. After going through several wireframe mock ups, programming began. As development was ongoing, changes were made on the fly; sometimes things on paper don’t behave the way we anticipate. Programming was broken down into steps. First, a static page was created in order to perfect how the UI was going to look and react. Next came the CMS programming; I narrowed my focus to making sure each of the displays worked individually before pulling everything together. Breaking things down into manageable sizes helped keep the project on task.