Enterprise Web Services
Enterprise Web Services Professional: Steve Merrill
As a member of Enterprise Web Services, my position is to assist the faculty/staff as well as the students with college related web projects from the initial idea to the final product. My personal mission at MCC is to make this college website a useful and informative tool which exceeds the needs and expectations of those using it. With experience dating back to 1992, it has been interesting watching the progression of our use of data over a world wide network to the point it is today. The work has just begun and we hope to make it more flexible as well as useful to those spending time on our website. All suggestions are welcome but especially the constructive ones.
The college currently uses Adobe Contribute for its mechanism of constructing and modifying many of the faculty and departmental web pages. I have been assigned the task of keeping up with and distributing the keys for this program as well as supporting it. If you use Contribute, be sure to visit the page set up for answering questions and offering support for the program on a self-paced scale.
We have begun to migrate the content of our website into a content management system (CMS) choosing to use Drupal. This will greatly enhance the usability of our website for those contributing as well as lighten our load upkeep and maintenance of the website once we have it in place and converted. An example of how Drupal appears can be found in my sandbox. We are currently coordinating with the ASU and Phoenix User Groups, a tremendous resource for each of us. Our production is beginning with the employees section where we are adding our static pages to the new Drupal format.
A recent use of maps formatted in Adobe Acrobat has benefited those searching for specific buildings on our campus. By using the Destination feature within Acrobat, we are able to link to a closeup 'view' of the building you are looking for. An example of this is our main library. Directions on syntax of this feature and additional examples may be found on the Locations Key page. A more useful feature now incorporates Flash as a very intuitive method of locating the information on a map of the campus.
Earlier (20 Aug 2008), we rolled out a new, more student-centered look for our website including the MCC homepage which was adapted from a personal site my eleven-year old son submitted to the recent Toshiba NSTA Exploravision contest.
One of the projects I began working on since September of 2006, before working for MCC, was adapting web pages for viewing on Internet-aware smart phones, also known as dotMobi. You can interact with one of these using an emulator to see CSLewis.mobi. With this and the new dot-Tel information, I hope to bring some expertise to the table and offer the capability of viewing our college information on smart phones in the near future using Drupal in combination with Dreamweaver CS4.
We maintain current statistics on our site using several methods. One of these is provided by Google in the form of Analytics, Webmaster Tools giving access to diagnostics of the provided sitemap. Did I mention you have to be logged in to view each of these tools? One item I would like to share with you is an ongoing project of interest in the collection of monthly statistics demonstrating our progress in the search engines/directories and how we favorably compare to the other colleges within our district. The work we are doing clearly shows a sharp progression over previous months as well as in relation to our sister colleges.
If you would enjoy taking part in technical blogs about our website, I've set up a great place to start. We will be covering topics dealing with everything from Adobe Contribute, DreamWeaver, web design, dotMob, dot-tel and many more. Join us by checking out our blog at Wherstead.Blogspot.com.
You may find me on campus Monday-Thursday if you have questions or need help. Our offices are located at the Southern and Dobson Campus on the second floor of the Library and High Technology Center, room LB 220, located in the Distance Learning room. Alternatively, view my work calendar for more details.
Please feel free to contact me at SteveMerrill . tel or Steven . Merrill @ mesacc . edu or by telephone at 480-461-7282.
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You may also contact Enterprise Web Services for comments or corrections by email or phone: 480-461-7491 or 480-461-7282.
