The College
The College of Notre Dame of Maryland (NDM) is a historically women’s college, located in northern Baltimore, MD. A college with a rich heritage of innovation, NDM educates a diverse population at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The Women’s College, Accelerated College and Weekend College for working women and men, and the Graduate Studies programs are the College’s principal offerings.

The Problem
When NDM initially launched its website over four years ago, hosting and maintenance of the site was outsourced to an outside company, who was responsible for updating the site. While initially effective, when NDM commenced a major information architecture redesign initiated in 2001, the College sought a fresh design and a content management system that would enforce style guidelines as well as allow non-technical staff to author and publish content themselves. NDM set an aggressive timeline for the site re-launch, in order to capture graduating high-school seniors in search of a college for the fall.

The Solution
NDM engaged Washington, D.C.-based Fig Leaf Software (FLS) to design and build the new site. FLS started by analyzing the disorganized content of the existing website, which was highly targeted to a female audience. NDM wanted to better organize and present information on the site, push content ownership to the experts in each department, and more effectively target content to specific audiences.

As different as the individual College’s programs are, they share a significant amount of campus-wide information including courses, facilities and admissions data. The information architecture project consolidated the common information from a management standpoint, while modifying the navigation system to allow users to access content from various locations within the site. In order to determine this updated information architecture, the Fig Leaf Software team interviewed a wide range of students, faculty and staff from each division and developed a detailed creative brief.

The graphic redesign focused on addressing each of the site’s main audience groups through concise information architecture combined with graphic imagery selected to appeal to the various groups – current and prospective students, and faculty and staff. The new home page design replaced static imagery of the campus with dynamic images of students and faculty, along with quote callouts and timely campus news and events. “Quick Links” and “Frequent Destinations” drop-downs allow users of the site quick access to information deeper in the site through a single click.

To meet NDM’s aggressive timeline, Fig Leaf Software performed a two-phase implementation. The first deployment was a completely redesigned 400-page static HTML site. The second deployment was a transparent shift to PaperThin’s CommonSpot Content Server to enable dynamic management of site content.

"In designing the new website, we knew it had to be dynamic and timely. Using CommonSpot is essential in keeping information up-to-date, not just on the homepage, but more deeply into the site as well,” noted Christine Langr, NDM’s Director of Marketing Communications.

Conversion of the static site into CommonSpot took just under two months, according to Sophia Mavromoustakos, NDM Webmaster, and member of the College’s Marketing Communications department. The new site was launched in December 2002. Responsibility for maintaining the content on the site is now distributed to the various departments across campus, and individual contributors receive CommonSpot authoring training, which Mavromoustakos created after having completed ‘Fig Leaf Software’s CommonSpot for Content Contributors’ class. She is also fully responsible for site and user administration.

NDM has employed different workflow and approval procedures depending on the content to be published. For example, in the athletic department content such as the latest sports scores requires no approval by the Marketing Communications group, and is published by a member of the athletic department staff directly. Other content that requires approval is routed to the Marketing Communications group for review and final publication.

NDM has found CommonSpot’s page information feature, which provides statistics to show authors who is viewing their content, to be particularly useful. Recently, using this CommonSpot analytic tool, the college’s nonprofit management department was able to clearly see that the improved presentation of their content actually made the information demonstrably easier for users to find. “The use of CommonSpot key words is also a great feature,” added Mavromoustakos. ”By assigning key words to pages or pieces of content, we can more effectively inter-relate content throughout the site.”

The Return
Were NDM’s goals met? “Absolutely!” said Mavromoustakos. From a design perspective, the fresh imagery and new information architecture allow the site to work as an effective marketing vehicle for the College as well as a useful information resource for current students, faculty and staff. The updated information architecture ensures users can quickly find the specific information they are looking for, many times in a single click. One example is the admissions information that was initially buried inside the Women’s College sub-site and is now accessible right from the home page. In addition, NDM was able to quantify to the Board of Trustees a measurable increase in site traffic, as well as an increase is positive feedback by site users. With the deployment of CommonSpot, the responsibility for authoring and publishing content has been effectively distributed to the content owners, as intended. And the ability for authors to track usages through CommonSpot provides an excellent real-time feedback mechanism to ensure that content is relevant.

“In terms of content management, we have been pleased with CommonSpot’s capabilities, including workflow, templating, ease of use for authors, and site and user administration. And we’re looking forward to implementing new features such as style sheets in the near future, too,” added Mavromoustakos. “We were very pleased with the Fig Leaf team – I’d give them an 8 out of 10. The project management team was very organized, and worked with us to ensure deadlines were met.”

Added Langr, "Although we are a small institution, the program offerings at the College of Notre Dame are diverse and complex. The ability to manage a large amount of information and to enable users to access the website effectively is critical, and we think we have a good foundation with this site and the CommonSpot platform."