This semester, Spring 2018, in CS 4624, Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access, our team pursued a project with the Virginia Tech Psychology Department and their Diversity Committee. We were tasked with enhancing the current Diversity and Inclusion webpages that are offered on the Psychology Department’s website. The clients desired for us to create new webpages that would enhance the recruitment of potential students and faculty, bring better awareness to the Department’s Diversity and Inclusion endeavors to current students and faculty, and allow users to easily and conveniently utilize the Department’s resources concerning Diversity and Inclusion.

We developed a new website for the Department that included eleven distinct pages with content related to Diversity and Inclusion. The information for the pages was gathered from the InclusiveVT Inclusion and Diversity Strategic Planning Guide [4], provided to us by our clients. We gathered a library of multimedia content for use on the website from the Department. We performed user walkthroughs and distributed a survey to members of the Department in order to gauge user satisfaction and areas requiring improvement. This survey also allowed users to submit additional multimedia content for our use.

The Department had also faced the issue of the ease of editing the current webpages that they are hosting. They wanted to be able to edit their webpages in an easier fashion, being able to upload news articles and new events that the Department was holding. They requested that we consider this as we approach the development of the new webpages.

We utilized WordPress to allow for a user-friendly environment for editing the webpages in the future. We made all of the clients administrators for the website so that they can make future changes and add other individuals to become administrators. We also created video tutorials that detail the step-by-step instructions to edit each portion of the website. These seven videos will allow for the clients and anyone with administrative access in the Department to be able to easily edit content without having to spend time learning the technology on their own.

They also were interested in updating their entire Psychology Department website, upgrading all of the current webpages to be modernized. If they found our design to be favorable to the current website’s design, then they would proceed to convert the entire website. This was a consideration for us as we proceeded, making sure to think about how the entire Department website could be converted and the effort that would involve for them or anyone who undertakes that task.