Phase three of the Bates Technical College website rebuild was completed in the fall of 2018. It was designed by the graphic designer at Bates, but the development of the WordPress theme was done by me. The site is pretty standard, except for the course catalog.
The previous workflow for updating program course information was frustrating. Deans would have to get the information approved by SBCTC (State Board of Community and Technical Colleges). A new course info sheet would then be put in a folder that everyone in the college had access to. The dean would then need to notify communications and web about the updated courses. For web, I would have to go into the folder and grab the file, copy and paste the data into Ingeniux CMS, copy the poorly created code that Ingeniux generated and fix it in a text editor, and then finally paste it back into Ingeniux. Exhausting when you have sixty or more programs at the college.
Institutional Research was already working on moving the courses to a database system for use in Tableau. I realized that I could make a call to those databases and get the info, that way when IR made their changes, it would automatically update on the website. So I built a small plugin for the website that made a call to the Microsoft SQL database for the info. Now, the process is seamless. Deans get the course changes approved and notify IR. IR updates the database and the website is automatically updated.
The website can be found here.