Process and Practice

Fork it! The benefits of sharing features at SWS

Anna Watt — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:40:40 +0000

Let’s say you want to make a cake but you don’t have a lot of time to make one from scratch. You already have a box of cake mix ready to go but this box is for chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. But you really wanted one with dark-chocolate ganache frosting —because you can never have too much chocolate.

Lessons Learned from 2+ Years of Using Behat

John Bickar — Sun, 12 Mar 2017 17:39:50 +0000

At the 2017 Stanford Drupal Camp, I facilitated a conversation about "Lessons Learned from 2+ Years Using Behat".

Investing in the Future: How our team takes the time to innovate for campus

Linnea Ann Williams — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 18:45:16 +0000

One of the challenges we at Stanford Web Services face as both a software development group as well as a client-facing web design team is finding time to create new and innovative tools for campus amidst client projects. Most of the time we are heads down, working with clients to launch scores of websites each year. So how do we approach innovating for campus?

JSE Quick Strike or: How We Launched a New Stanford School of Engineering Website in 10 Weeks

Jamie C. Tsui — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 20:16:25 +0000

Three days after Stanford’s commencement on June 12th this year, we quietly launched a completely new website for Stanford’s School of Engineering. From start to finish, the web project took 10 weeks. This project included new design, new feature development, content migration, and feature and browser testing. In the end, the site launched smoothly with no downtime.

Cardinal at Work: Lessons Learned from Launching a Supersite

Brittany Cripe — Tue, 17 May 2016 18:02:52 +0000

Creating the Cardinal at Work website was an opportunity for UHR to enhance the employee experience at Stanford. Our primary focus was consolidating and reorganizing content from 12 employee websites into a single online destination.

Now, faculty, staff and retirees can access information about benefits and rewards, career development, management, and connection opportunities in one convenient location. The site is also enhanced with features such as advanced search, a resource library, navigation by role, task and topic, and much more.

As with any large-scale initiative, getting to the finished product was no easy feat. From start to finish the process took nearly two years and more than 2,100 hours of technical and content development work to complete. Needless to say, we learned A LOT in the process and have compiled some of these “Lessons Learned” in case they may help others embarking on the website redesign journey.

So without further ado, here are some of the lessons we learned from launching a supersite.

Improving your business operations with a CRM

Jamie C. Tsui — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 20:25:18 +0000

Stanford Web Services serves a diverse set of clients throughout Stanford University, ranging as large as schools to as small as individual labs. With over 200 active or completed website projects, and an average of 18 new project inquiries per month, we needed to implement a Customer Relationship Management system to track all of our operational data and communications.

Granular Feature Development

Shea Ross McKinney — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 20:19:19 +0000

Creating a Drupal Feature is easy. Creating a Drupal Feature that everyone can use is really hard.

Transparency in Product Development

Jamie C. Tsui — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 21:05:07 +0000

While Stanford Web Services can be seen as a service provider, often involved with custom projects and closely working with clients, one of our core offerings is also our Jumpstart product. With any product offering company, as adoption and usage of the products grow, more and more customers give feedback and express interest in the future direction of the product. Lately, our group has been contemplating increasing transparency in our product development roadmap, and to what extent.

Thoughts on Design and Agile

Megan Erin Miller — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 15:00:06 +0000

Over the past three years, I have been the sole designer with Stanford Web Services. I like to think that I’ve levelled up the rest of the team to embody user experience best practices and approaches to everything we do, though the reality is that I’ve had to wear many hats: user experience designer, content strategist, visual designer, themer… As our team has grown, this role I’ve played has grown as well, and it’s given me a perspective on how different facets of design fit best for different types of projects.

5 Useful Google Analytics Standard Reports To Check Out For Your Website

Joe Knox — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 17:05:18 +0000

You can do a lot to improve the performance and user experience across your site by making use of your Google Analytics account. In this post, we'll cover five valuable standard reports that you can view for your site right now.

This post aligns with the Google Analytics set up and menu structure as of September 22, 2015.

Using Stanford Feeds for easier content maintenance

Caryl J Westerberg — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 16:30:00 +0000

Would you like to display courses on your website? How about events or links to people profiles? The Stanford community provides a variety of web feeds which provide data or content that your Drupal website can leverage.

Frequently the content you need on your website is already published on another website. Rather than adding this content manually to your website, you can use a web feed to import this published content from the source website and display it on your website.

So, you need an intranet?

Caryl J Westerberg — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:00:10 +0000

Frequently, at Stanford Web Services we receive requests to build an intranet as part of a website. What exactly do people mean by "intranet?" Each department, lab, and institute might have different requirements an "intranet." Let's look at some different ways you might want to use an intranet and the tools available at Stanford that can help make your intranet possible.

What is an intranet?

According to our old friend Wikipedia, an intranet is:

Card sorting: Defining related content categories

Linnea Ann Williams — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:30:03 +0000

Card sorting is a powerful, hands-on tool that we at Stanford Web Services use for helping content creators iron out either the information architecture of their site (meaning the big buckets of their navigation) or to develop categories for their content.

Recently, we used card sorting to develop a secondary sidebar navigation of "Related Content" that crossed the main navigation of a website, and these are my takeaways.

Reinventing our work via Service Design

Zach Chandler — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 15:00:00 +0000

Service Design is an emerging practice area that can transform organizations, and create immense value. Stanford Web Services has already begun to introduce Service Design into the way that they develop services for the University. We should all think about more ways to put it into practice.

How We Learn Anything New, and the Importance of Focusing on Practice

Joe Knox — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 15:30:00 +0000

When learning something new — no matter what it is — many of us move through the same levels of competence. In this post, we'll look at this progression of learning, and discuss how a focus on practice can lead to a more sustained level of self-awareness.