Transitioning To A New Design
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 3:00pm -- Kat Liendgens
Many of our customers have been maintaining their website in Cascade Server for a number of years now, so we are seeing more and more organizations who are going through the process of re-designing their website. Naturally, the biggest question that arises is “How do I implement my new design in Cascade without having to copy and paste all of my content into the new pages?”
The short answer to this question is that you can create a new Configuration (“new-html”, for example) which uses your new templates. You can then publish the new output to a staging server, and once everything looks the way you want it, publish to Production. Sounds easy, right? Sure, but there are several things that you need to consider:
How will the new templates be mapped to the current pages?
You need to determine which of the current Content Types will use which new Templates. If your new design requires additional new Content Types, you have to know which, if any, of the current pages should be using the new Content Types. I highly recommend capturing the mapping on a spreadsheet to ensure that you don’t overlook any of your existing pages.
How do the current Data Definitions correspond to the new ones that you will need?
This is the tricky part. Take a look to determine if your current Data Definitions are compatible with your new ones. For instance, if you have a WYSIWYG editor for the main content, an image chooser for your main image, and a WYSIWYG editor for a side column, then you would be in good shape if you had the same Data Definitions for your new design, even if the look and the placement of the content is completely different. In some cases, you may add some fields (such as a block chooser for call-outs) which is not a problem if you explain to your end users ahead of time that they will see some additional fields that will have no impact on the current design and content. However, if your new design constitutes a drastic departure from your current design with regard to Data Definitions, then you would have to manually create all of the content for your new pages since the system would have no way of knowing which structured data on your current design would have to go to which field in the new design. Therefore, prior to designing your new site, I recommend that you ensure that your current Data Definitions can be used for the new design if it is important to you to minimize manual content migration.
Will the new design require a new folder structure?
If your site contains any folder-driven content, such as dynamic navigation, it is of utmost importance to refrain from moving folders or page assets until the new configurations have been implemented and tested and you are ready to call a content freeze. During the content freeze, nothing will be published to the Production server while you go through the process of re-arranging the directory structure. Once you’re done, publish to a staging server, perform QA, and then publish your new site to Production.
We recently had the pleasure of working on a project for Bouvé College of Health Sciences who did an outstanding job planning their redesign process. While the new look and feel of the site was quite different from the old site, Bouvé managed to maintain their current Data Definitions and just added a few new ones. Therefore, no existing content had to be moved to new structured data. Bouvé also succeeded in keeping the exact same Content Types that they had on their previous site. After calling a content freeze, they re-arranged their assets to match their new navigational structure, tested the new site, and went live with the new site last week. Feel free to take a look: www.northeastern.edu/bouve/
If you have any questions about best practices with regard to implementing a new design, please do not hesitate to contact us.
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