The Blog

After seven months of reader surveys and wireframes, my former college paper, The Michigan Daily, finally launched its website redesign last week.

Read all about it on the Daily’s Editor’s Blog here.

The front-end redesign marks the final step in the Daily’s switch to new hosting. The process started over a year ago when the Daily decided for various reasons not to renew its contract with Viacom’s College Publisher.

The former design — which was introduced in 2006 — was suitable for College Publisher’s Content Management System (CMS), though many of the frontend features only became available through extensive backend hacking.

Once the Daily brought the CMS in house, however, that design quickly became restrictive and outdated. The new CMS — a highly customized version of the opensource Drupal platform — allowed for much more design freedom.

I was the Daily’s Managing Online Editor in 2008. It was interesting to see firsthand how dramatically our publishing process changed once the new system was implemented.

Because the old CMS lacked proper XML downloading software for articles, they had to be manually placed on the website after all the pages were sent to the printer. So during our final semester with CP, I managed a staff that started working at 1 am.

When the new CMS launched last fall, we no longer needed to maintain a separate online staff to upload stories. Now, section editors are able to publish stories to the website before they are placed in the print edition.

Though my term as Online Editor ended at the beginning of the year, I was part of the team that helped launch the frontend redesign you see today.

The process began this past January when I formed a website redesign committee. After the earliest meetings, the new editors launched reader surveys and gathered together ideas for the new website.

From that feedback I worked on the wireframes. Towards the end of the semester — my final days at Michigan — I was involved in translating the wireframes to CSS and Javascript. That rest of the backend coding was handed over to others once I graduated.

This is the second redesign I’ve been involved with at the Daily. In 2006, I headed a print redesign.

Lessons Learned

If there’s anything I took away from this web redesign, it’s that you have to be patient with coding. I’ve never wanted to rip my hair out more than I did when I was translating the wireframes to CSS.

Another thing I learned: print and web designs are completely different. (Obviously). Going into this redesign, I already knew that I’d be limited to the web fonts and a strict 960 pixel grid. But taking other things into account — loading speeds, differing web browsers, saving images for the web, predetermined ad sizes — never crossed my mind until the redesign committee received feedback from staff and readers.

All in all, I’d say the experience was frustrating and challenging. And I’d love to do it again.