The client, Karen Iannaconne, maintains three websites for Dr. Kingston. As her main duties are those of an administrative assistant and not a website admin, she cannot spend all her time trying to figure out all the ins and outs of the Ensemble Content Management System (Ensemble CMS) or troubleshooting migrating a website. Therefore, the main goal of this project is to improve the client’s quality of life using Ensemble’s features and teach the client how to implement them herself.
The Kingston website needed a site migration done and was not working due to the paid plugins and themes on WordPress not being automatically migrated. The bulk of this project is geared towards the Ensemble CMS for the features that the client will be needing instead of a basic tutorial of it as the client already has experience with the system. User testing was conducted on the Virginia Tech Center for Drug Discovery website as there was a major overhaul of the website. User testing is also conducted on the Virginia Drug Discovery Consortium website as it was already a complete website and did not need any changes. User testing was done by creating tasks for the subjects in order to navigate the website. By assigning these tasks and getting feedback from the subjects, we can see what areas of the website need to be changed in order for users to more comfortably navigate through the website. Although the feedback given sometimes means something is wrong, this does not necessarily mean that we can change what is needed. This is because the inherent capabilities of the CMS do not allow us to do so in most cases, or doing a complete overhaul is not feasible in the timeframe given. Initially, I had taken more of a teaching role in this project. However, nearing the end of the semester, we needed to get the work finished so that I would have something tangible to show, so the client and I decided to allow me to do all the repetitive work required while still writing up documentation for the client to use in the future. Most of this work was just creating webpages for the news stories as well as adding information to each of the biography pages for the faculty. In most of the biography pages, there are hyperlinks that lead to other websites. The client and I decided that these hyperlinks should create new pages whenever a redirection to a new site is made.