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Overview
The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia is among the most reknowned institutions researching U.S. Presidential history today. Its work on transcribing the tapes of conversations kept by Presidents Nixon, Kennedy, Johnson and others represent one of the most important accomplishments in understanding the nature of the Presidency as well as the leadership challenges faced during those administrations (1961 - 1975).
A cornerstone of the Miller Center's public education and awareness activity is its AmericanPresident.org web site.
The Challenge
The Miller center faced challenges implementing the updated version of its AmericanPresident web site due to extensive multimedia content, complex structure of content, and predefined human as well as financial resources that prevented a reinvention of the wheel (or acquiring expensive off the shelf solutions).
Complex Content Structure
Before the American President website was implemented, Polar Design and the Miller Center developed a conceptual framework for the site based on two main "pillars":
- The “Presidency in History”
- The “Presidency in Action”
The Miller Center and Polar conceived two unique informational and navigational structure for both sites featuring overlapping heirarchies. For example, content in the "President in Action" pillar is organized according to 7 general topics as well as based on actual administration offices. Normally this type of structure would present maintenance nightmares for HTML coders or even most content management solutions.
Multimedia Content
In addition, the Miller Center desired extensive multimedia content (in Flash) with a volume and complexity of information that would normally require many hundreds of hours of Flash development:
- Flash history timeline for each President
- click here for an example
- Flash organizational chart of Presidential administrations
- click here for an example
- Flash Presidential "chooser" for the History pillar home page
- click here for an example
Solution
Polar Design first consulted with the Miller Center to identify common layouts, content structure and other aspects of the information that could be rendered into "templates." We further succeeded in developing the Flash elements above as fully modifiable Flash templates that could be easily updated by InsightBuilder. Finally we identified areas of heavy information "reuse" - i.e., articles that appear in more than one place - and developed an information structure inside InsightBuilder to allow users to add the content just once to save time.
Once the site structure was documented, Polar Design transposed the site structure and the design into InsightBuilder 2, its content management solution (CMS), by creating the necessary XSL templates for the client.
After approximately one half-day of on site training and one additional follow up session by web conference, the Miller Center team was able to quickly train a team of several interns to use the system and make changes to all content, including articles, Flash templates, photos and other aspects of the site.
Conclusion and Result
After four months of concerted effort, Miller's entire team of interns cost effectively added 10,000 individual articles, images and data files quickly and cost effectively - and without requiring an expensive internal team of coders and Flash designers.
Utilizing a flexible and easy to use content management solution (CMS) like InsightBuilder 2 is part of the solution that saved the Miller Center time and money in realizing is ambitious plans. Additionally, Polar Design's experienced and helpful staff of information architects and developers assisted in conceiving an optimal structure by understanding the Center's goals and helping it realize them.
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