A few weeks ago I put a call out for a student developer (opens new window) looking to work with us. The response was awesome, thank you everyone who inquired! Unfortunately we only had one spot and that position was filled by Brett Brainered.

Brett is a senior in the computer science program and has done web work for the last few years. He started two or so weeks ago and I just haven't had the chance to post about it. Brett jumped right in to adding tools to our CMS and you should start seeing some of the work he is doing shortly.

His first project is expanding the report and maintenance areas for each site in the CMS. We are adding a "page analyzer" which will inspect the content on each page within a site. Check it for broken, development or slow responding links and images. It will then validate the content and/or clean it up with HTML Tidy.

We have been doing quite a bit of redesigns lately and often the structure of a redesign changes from the current site. The page analyzer will have the ability to download an Excel sheet for us to start a content audit. Once we determine where each page will transition to we can put that information in the CMS and have this tool copy the pages to the new development site in the new location for the department to begin working on cleaning it up. It will be a big help to have this migration done automatically.

Whiteboard Learning

The first thing we did with Brett was to walk him through the tools and flow of how our pages execute. We don't have any official documents where this is explained. We like to keep our process as agile as possible so things may change faster than we can document them. Probably not the ideal situation but it works.

We do all our teaching on whiteboards. Whiteboards are the best way to show an idea visually as it matures and offers the ability to change and manipulate things as you step through and learn. I personally have probably 100+ pictures of whiteboard drawings which explain various UI interfaces to code execution.

Below is the flow of our page execution for our web apps. Not all sites go through this same process, just our large applications. It might look a little confusing, especially since it's pretty sloppy, but you can get an idea of the flow.

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I think I will start posting more whiteboards on the blog. After looking through them I realize how useful they are in explaining why we do the things we do. The decisions behing UI elements and user flow through a site are told as a story on the board and that is really valuable information.