HomeDCA website merges with UCF
Following the merger of Dartington College of Arts with University College Falmouth in April 2008, altcom was commissioned to integrate the DCA website content within the UCF content management system. The deadline was set for July 31 2008 and work began in May.
Whilst the altcom design team got stuck into the re-design, the rest of the team took over maintenance of the ASP based DCA site and set up a local mirror to analyse how the content was constructed and plan the migration. UCF staff prepared a content mapping and a work programme was established. Much of the DCA content needed rewriting completely or reworking. THis was also true of the UCF website content as new sections and categories needed to be created to accommodate the addition of a whole new set of courses.
The DCA system was not a content management system. It was based on a series of files linked to MS Access databases, with some content in the databases and some just hard coded into ASP pages. Extracting content efficiently was a major concern but altcom and UCF were able to work seanlessly together to both gather up the content and refactor it for the new integrated site.
The deadline was pulled forward to 25 July but the only minor headache was the timing of the domain switchovers and creation of 301 permanent redirects for the top scoring DCA pages. The switchover process also required the creation of a legacy version of the DCA site so that current staff and students on UCF's Dartington Campus could access some historical info that was deliberately not taken across.
The redesign work is featured below. Several extensions to the content management system functionality were made, including the addition of flexible topic coding and RSS feed generation. Wider use of Ajax and javascript has been made than before with great effort being made to ensure that the results are accessible.
Web design case study: University College Falmouth
altcom nurtures a well-founded zeal when it comes to standards-based web
development. We craft websites that meet the most stringent principles
of best practice. A website's visual design has an enormous part to play in
ensuring we meet these standards and our web design team is well versed in realising
usable, accessible and elegant designs based on any creative source.
In the case of University College Falmouth, the yearly design overhaul is driven by the latest prospectus. We are extremely proud to announce the launch of V.4 - merged with content from the former Dartington College of Arts website and packed full of innovative "Web 2.0" wizardry.
Click on the prospectuses to discover more about the three most recent incarnations of www.falmouth.ac.uk.
Prospectus 2007In 2006, altcom teamed up with local brand development agency Nixon. The design employed a vibrant colour palette, improved site navigation and an ingenious technique to allow for the use of non-web fonts for headings, enabling tight intergration with the prospectus.
Prospectus 2008The 2007 treatment was the work of altcom's new dedicated creative team. Again, taking inspiration from the latest prospectus, we produced a visually uncluttered yet stunning template featuring a sophisticated animated navigation bar and a rotating, letterbox student art showcase in the masthead.
Prospectus 2009"University College Falmouth merged with Dartington college of arts on 6 April 2008. The coming together of two such prestigious institutions heralds an exciting new era for arts education in the south west." This years overhaul was more of a design challenge than usual considering the volume of information to be imported from Dartington's website. More content demanded more space, and after some deliberation we widened the page and made sure that important information was kept to the left of the browser for the small minority of users with lower resolution monitors. Other pioneering techniques have been employed to conserve on vertical space. Take a look for yourself!
