This third iteration of the School of Visual Arts' website was its largest, most comprehensive website to date. With over 800 pages linking over 50 departments, necessitating at its peak, more than 20 people working full-time to design, develop, and debug; requiring compatibility with 10 different browsers across four different platforms, with a planning and design phase spanning nearly two years, the scale of this project was bigger than anything I had previously undertaken.

Prior to launch my principal role was as project manager for the School of Visual Arts, overseeing day to day operations and bearing responsibility for design cohesiveness, quality assurance testing, browser compatibility, workflow integrity, departmental approvals, IT systems integration, bug finding and follow-ups. Post-launch my responsibilities shifted to maintaining the site and adding features and functionality for any of the College's departments on top of the open-source Symfony framework.

Preparing and launching the site was a large team effort that involved the entirety of the Visual Arts Press, the in-house web and print design office of the School of Visual Arts, led by Michale Walsh, Director of Design and Digital Media. Web designers and developers Carey Estes and Bola Famuyiwa of the Press also contributed heavily to all of the above. The design concept and development was done by Funny Garbage.

The first two goals of the site were to make it a more democratic representation of the College and to leverage the social media activity in which most departments were already engaging. Both of these goals were accomplished right from the get-go on the homepage. The Trending Now section of the homepage is actually an aggregation of over 200 social media feeds from across the College's digital campus. Any department, whether it be academic or administrative, by virtue of using social media—blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.—thereby has access to the homepage. All social media feeds are aggregated in the content management system and undergo a curation process before they are published to the homepage. As a result, the homepage is never static as new content is added daily. In addition, social media feeds are heavily integrated into relevant pages, keeping otherwise static content fresh by constantly pulling in new social media content, like on the MFA Interaction Design landing page.

The other main goal was the very common, "make things easier to find." This we accomplished by using accordion menus as drawers for content. Instead of having long, scrolling pages, content is compartmentalized, like on the Undergraduate Application Requirements page. This allows us to combine the content of multiple pages into one page which has the double benefit of reducing the page count (nearly in half!) while aggregating previously separate bits of information in one place.

The site launched March 7th, 2012. On March 8th Michael Walsh came into the office and said, "Alright, so when can we start redesigning it?" Not for a while Michael, not for a while...