I have finished day three as the new webmaster for the College of Fine arts. I must say things have been pretty easy going so far, namely because it takes forever to get you into the system at the U of A, and until I am in the system I can’t really do a whole lot.

Monday:

I spent the majority of my time Monday getting the computer set up and meeting with different people in the college. A big part of my job is meeting with the different department heads to discuss what their needs are for their school’s specific site. They are formaly introducing me this Thursday.

Tuesday

Tuesday was spent getting my self set up with a project management system. I am using Things, a very handy little app. I will be writing a more lengthy review later about it, but I really love this application. I may even be able to convince the rest of the department to start using it for project management.

A big part of getting my self set up with a task management system was finding actual task to do, so I spent a decent amount of time going through the College of Fine Art website, as well as each of the individual school sites. I found some quirks here and there as well as some things I am looking to try and rework a bit to try and bring a bit more clarity and consistency. These mainly center around navigation. All of this went into things and each task is organized under either the main site or each of the school sites. Things is incredibly useful.

Impressions So Far:

Though it has only been two days, I am really starting to get a hold of what the job will entail. A huge challenge will be the information architecture of all the information that is contained in the sites.

Everything is pretty much broken up into three tiers. The first tier is the main site for the College of Fine arts. This has all the general information and gives a general overview of everything going on with all the schools. Tier two is comprised of all the different school sites. There is quite a bit of overlap between tier one and tier two, and this is something I am hoping to sort out for the sake of usability. The third tier consists of sites for specific programs as well as sites for different professors in the different schools. I generally won’t have a whole lot involvement with these. I only oversee and give input here and there.

Trying to organize, categories, and structure all this information so that it is easily findable is a project that I am really looking forward to. It probably won’t happen for a while (until the next redesign happens), but it something that I am already thinking a lot about. Information architecture is incredibly interesting to me, and is something that I have never done on this scale before. I will be doing a great deal of research in the coming weeks and months on the subject. I am looking forward to it.

Outside of the the information, another challenge will be finding balance in handling the desires of others and what is most beneficial to the site. Feature creep is inevitable, especially when dealing with a committee. I do have experience in this, though again not at this level. Being the point man for such a large organization’s websites is something I have never taken on before, but I have a great deal of support and I feel I am quite up to the challenge. I am generally pretty good at talking my way in and out of things.

Once again I have waited far too long to write, so sadly, this will be yet another catch up post. I am hoping to get better about this in the coming months for reasons which will become apparent later in the post.

Why you should back up your data (advice from recent experience)

My G5’s hard drive died a few days ago. Luckily it is still under warranty, and there wasn’t anything on there work wise that I didn’t have backed up else where. Sadly there was a lot of personal data that could be potentially lost forever. A lot of photos, a lot of music, and the redesign that I was working on for this site may not be recoverable.

This last one is probably the biggest pain to bear. I had pumped a lot of hours into the redesign and it was getting close to completion (as far as the design aspects are concerned at least). Apple will hopefully be able to recover my data, but it is hard to say. It will be a tremendous set back in the redesign if those file cannot me recovered.

I do love a good excuse.

Since I most certainly can’t be without a computer for a whole seven days, I took this as an opportunity to finally purchase a MacBook Pro. A purchase I have wanted to make for quite sometime now, but never had a good enough “reason” to actually go through with. Well now I have said “reason”, so I bit the bullet and shelled out the money for the laptop. Granted this “reason” may not be good enough, but there are other reasons for this purchase as well, which I am coming to.

I also purchased the 500GB Time Capsule to back up the laptop as well as the G5 when I get it back. So, hopefully, I will never lose data again.

Finally got around to it.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 today. Actually it was 2.5.1 if we are being technical… which we are. It was painless and I am enjoying the new interface, though it did take a short amount of time to locate everything. Happy Cog did a bang-up job on the redesign of the back end, and I must say I do love the color scheme.

Lastly, but best of all!

I have acquired a new job, a job that could only be described as the best possible position that I could have at this point in my career. I have been appointed as the Webmaster for the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona. It will be challenging but in a good way. It will stretch my design and development muscles and push me in new directions on the web. Academia is always on the bleeding edge and this is exactly where I love to be.

I will also be going back to school at a severely reduced tuition rate to finish my bachelor’s degree and possibly get my master’s as well. This is the second reason for the new computer. While the U of A will provide me with a Laptop for the job, I wouldn’t feel comfortable using it for school, and since I generally need a decent amount of power to do what I do, I purchased the MacBook Pro.

This is also why I hope to be blogging more in the future. I think it will be applicable to my job and I will have more to write about day to day.

To Summarize

A lot has happened and mostly for good. I am looking forward to the coming weeks as I settle into the position and to the coming fall semester.