It isn't often we have to say goodbye to full time employees (actually it has only happened twice in our six year department history) but this was Nick West (opens new window)'s last week at Wayne State. Nick took a position at the University of Washington's Information School (opens new window). While it is a tremendous loss for our department we are excited for Nick and his wife, Marie (opens new window), (who recently began working in our department (opens new window) while Jenn Di Sano was on maternity leave) on their future endeavors.

West's Go West

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Nick was instrumental in making the Wayne State Web what it is today. Not a day has passed in the last four years that Nick didn't contribute his insights, initiatives and attitude. Doing everything from core back end applications to front end HTML, CSS and with an emphasis on accessibility.

A snapshot of Nick's contributions:

Blogs (opens new window) - Setting up Wordpress in a multi site environment, integrating our existing authentication system, programming frontend templates, optimizing for the potential of hundreds of blogs getting a massive amount of traffic. The system is now completely self service.

Today@Wayne.edu (opens new window) - Single handedly developed the methods to pull content from over twenty separate sources on and off campus to comprise a constantly updated daily newspaper. The front end of the site doesn't touch a database and can sustain a massive amount of traffic with very little load on the Web server.

Student Senate (opens new window) - Nick was not only responsible for the front end website development but also wrote and integrated a voting system where students could voice their opinions and vote on other topics being discussed. It truly gave the students a voice and raised the stature of the Student Senate as a whole.

Homepage Re-align (opens new window) - Our homepage is constantly changing, Nick was the one behind almost every code update on the front page. Ensuring the code is as optimized as possible for browser support, accessibility and standards. He also created the functionality behind the "current students in class" ticker.

College of Engineering - A yet to be launched complete re-vamp of the College of Engineering website. Bending our CMS to his will he managed to get ten completely disbursed departments into a unifying template that shares news, events, photos and even page content.

Base Events Class - Events are integral to almost every single website we oversee. Nick created a flexible PHP class that is used through every one of our sites. It allows us to pull events in almost every imaginable configuration. This class has saved countless number of hours and headaches. It was his planning and foresight that made it possible.

Event Payment RSVP’s - It's one thing to take RSVP's for an event, it's another to accept payment for each registration. Because of the laws imposed on universities we have to use a third party vendor to accept credit cards. Nick created an interface that makes it easy for us to connect an event to item codes that direct the funds right in to the departmental accounts.

Class Schedule API - Working in conjunction with C&IT Nick worked to pull all the course information for the upcoming semesters. This includes all sections and instructors. This allows us to have complete synchronization of the courses throughout all our websites. It also allows us to list all the courses a professor is teaching right within their public profile, no need to jump to another page.

Combined Search Results Page (opens new window) - Twenty percent of our visitors use the search on wayne.edu. Just providing the Web pages that match the search terms wasn't enough. Using Google Custom Search and our internal API's Nick integrated matching courses, buildings, events and people in to a single results page. The result was a page that is now 100x more useful than just the Google results alone.

PHPSimpl (opens new window) - Last but not least Nick actively contributed to the open source PHP framework that we developed and use as the core of all our websites.

His contributions are second to none and he will truly be missed, we wish Nick and Marie the best of luck. They are always welcome back any time.

Follow their adventure

You can follow Nick and Marie's adventure west on their blog: http://westsgowest.com/ (opens new window)

What's next?

With that said it means we are soon going to be looking for a full time Web developer. Keep your eye on our blog (subscribe (opens new window)) for updates on when the position will be posted. We hope it will be in the next two weeks. It is a great opportunity to work with an amazing team to learn, teach and impact the Web in a positive way.