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Linnea Ann Williams

Linnea Ann Williams's Blog Posts

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

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on October 7, 2016 - 11:45 am

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?

Card sorting: Defining related content categories

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on August 21, 2015 - 10:30 am

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.

Agile Project Management and its flavors: where does Scrum end and Kanban begin?

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on July 30, 2014 - 1:18 pm

Agile has become a big buzz word recently in the project management world. In this post, I'll try to clarify where some of the lines are being blurred between terms like Agile and Scrum, and what some of these terms actually mean.

Keep in mind while reading this that I am primarly trained in Scrum, so my descriptions of other Agile methodologies are only decently informed. :)

What is Agile Project Management?

From the ever-present wikipedia:

Top 6 things to do while your cache clears on its own

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on June 23, 2014 - 3:05 pm

Caches are a great tool, they store your website's database and code information in a way that loads much faster. But they DO mean that your changes don't appear right away.

Where are my changes?

One of the things we here at Stanford Web Services get emailed about most frequently is, "Why did my changes disappear when I logged out?" The answer is that the site caches haven't yet been updated, but they will if we wait a little bit (sometimes a few hours or so).

Scrum Resources: Learn about Agile Project Management

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on January 7, 2014 - 8:00 am

Welcome back! We're kicking off the new year with a post on Agile Project Management. I've been speaking a lot to folks recently about Scrum and how to think about incorporating it into your team structure.

One form of Agile project management, Scrum is an iterative development process that focuses the development team on the highest priority work and increases the product/project manager's ability to forecast timelines and delivery. For Web Services, it has improved our project estimates and helped us to work in a more focused way on our larger projects.

Menu Tricks #4: Menu Block with Bootstrap Dropdowns

Submitted by Linnea Ann Williams on October 15, 2013 - 9:05 am

Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about using Menu Block module. In this post, I'll talk about how Menu Block integrates with Stanford's Drupal 7 themes to create dropdown menus.

To properly leverage the dropdowns in Twitter Bootstrap with Drupal, there are a few things to keep in mind...

Note: This post pertains to these Drupal 7 themes:

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