April Merwin - Projects: Portland Community College

Portland Community College

March 2000 to November 2002

In March of 2000, I was hired as a part-time member of a loose web development team for Portland Community College, one of the largest community colleges in the nation with three campuses, over 100 other brick and mortar educational sites, and an enrollment during my tenure of over 100,000 students per term. Soon I was offered a full time position on a team of two people responsible for this large site and all of the ancillary sites attached to it.

My duties included a wide range of tasks that ranged from being solely responsible for keeping track of all site updates, making sure they were executed accurately and on time, often soliciting information from individuals as diverse as the President of the college to the room scheduler for each individual campus to assisting in the design and building of sub-sites for departments in a highly political environment.

My first project was to redesign the user interface for the entire site. The original design was very difficult to navigate with colors and images that made the college look like an amateur organization. Many of the links were image maps, making it inaccessible to students with disabilities. The pages loaded very slowly and were difficult to read. Navigation took people down five or six layers to dead ends. Images had not been optimized and inconsistencies in the graphics were jarring. To say the least, the site had a multitude of problems.

Our goal was to establish strong branding on the site that projected an image of Portland Community College as a quality educational institution. Using my expertise as a web producer, the PCC web site became easy to navigate with lightening fast downloads even over slow dial up connections. Students with a wide variety of disabilities were able to use it effortlessly (I established a loose committee of disabled students who advised me on accessibility and checked our pages, as well as learning as much as I could on the subject). Although produced in GoLive back when it was the leading web development tool, I did much of the coding by hand, and tested the site's performance on a variety of platforms and situations, driving the site to become the excellent web information tool for students, instructors and the community that it became.

The redesign launched in September 2002 consisted of a home page, which changed frequently, and two basic types of pages: a section home page, and content pages. The flat structure made it easy to navigate both through a browser interface as well as through the internal navigation tools.

My design ideas for navigation and a simplification of elements, along with many other suggestions, were readily accepted by the designer, who was the other part of this team. Many of the enhancements that continue to be features of the site were from my influence. We developed an excellent working relationship that allowed an easy exchange of ideas and I quickly grew in this position from a college student to a professional trusted by deans, administrative staff, instructors, student organizations and departments.

I was eventually given leeway to design the main home page, an example of which is included in the samples. I learned to successfully navigate the complex and highly political environment of the college meeting with diverse groups who had their own strong agendas regarding the web. I produced a number of successful sub-sites and ancillary sites that not only pleased difficult clients but got them the results they wanted.

PCC/WebEasy

March 2000 to November 2002
(web site)

During my tenure at PCC I was also a key player in the development of a web-based design tool that allowed faculty, staff and student organizations to publish information directly on the web. Working with a Cold Fusion developer based in New Zealand, I simplified and enhanced the complex core program he had developed into what is now called PCC/WebEasy, a tool that staff and instructors use to publish publishes most of the faculty their content on the site.

Up until this time instructors and departments had no way to publish information for their students other than to learn HTML and establish a rogue site, with all the attended difficulties that entailed. Although WebEasy will be replaced with a portal solution in the next few years, this innovative, inexpensive web publishing tool was at the time, cutting edge and over a year ahead of any other simplified web development tool on the market.