Westminster College (http://www.westminstercollege.edu/)
Westminster College is Utah's only private, non-denominational, non-profit college. The College offers graduate degrees in business, communications, education, and nursing and 28 undergraduate programs including liberal arts, business, and science.
Challenge
· To create a distributed content management system, while "locking down" visual elements.
· To dynamically load ColdFusion content into Macromedia Flash interface.
Benefits
· Application saved Westminster College tens of thousands of dollars in license fees for commercial web content management software.
· Rapid Development—Built a complete site in three months, smaller applications in as little as 48 hours
· Power—"Hands down, ColdFusion is an extremely powerful development tool."
· Integration of Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion—Westminster dynamically populates and displays Macromedia Flash animations with data from ColdFusion.
Project Details
Founded in 1875, Westminster College provides a foundation of broad traditional education, combined with professional programs that include important technical and communication skills. U.S. News & World Report has ranked Westminster in the top tier for regional colleges and universities for seven straight years.
As a relatively small institution, Westminster emphasizes a high-touch, personalized education experience where students are more than a number and can interact freely with faculty and peers on an intimate campus. Until recently, one area of the Westminster infrastructure that hadn't fully supported this vision was its overlooked website.
According to Stephan Ross, computer support manager for the Westminster Information Technology (IT) Department, the site was receiving only sporadic content updates and suffered from fragmented design presentations originating from different content providers.
"As recently as two years ago, Westminster had not placed a high institutional priority on the site and how it could play a strategic role in the various processes and functions of the college," he said. "Another challenge for us was content management. Different departments across the academic and administrative spectrum have responsibility for their respective sections of the site. Our previous website content contribution system didn't 'lock-down' the interface and visual elements enough. So when content owners changed content, they also freely modified the visual appearance of the pages as they saw fit. That created a hodgepodge of different visual styles and designs that diluted our college image.
"Soon, however, our admissions department was noticing significant and sustained increases in online applications for admission. We all started to see that the website could play a key role in recruitment and retention. That really gave us a mandate to revamp our site and align it more completely with our mission to create a site that would engage prospective students and deliver a true sense of what our College is all about. We expanded our staff and set out to rebuild the entire site."
Selecting The Proper Platform For Development
The first step for Ross, programmer Willy Ray, system administrator Devin Callaway, and designers Andrew McQuinn and Richard Williams was to phase out its web development platform based on the now-defunct NetObjects TeamFusion.
"With TeamFusion, you can get a lot of extraneous files that slow performance, and content contributors have too much control over layout and design decisions," said McQuinn. "Some of the pages would crash and corrupt other files, and others suffered from poor design—it wasn't a workable solution."
The team decided to proceed in one of two directions. It would either implement a vertically integrated commercial platform such as Vignette or iLevel's Insite Server or build its own solution using Macromedia Flash, ColdFusion, and Dreamweaver—tools they already owned and knew very well.
"At first, the commercial packages seem appealing," admitted Ross. "But they're very expensive and they never fit exactly the way you need them to. We knew we wanted a database and a single, centrally managed source of content. We knew we wanted a solution that would run on open-source Linux. And when we looked at other commercial and peer-college websites we saw that the excellent sites—the ones we really liked—all seemed to use Macromedia Flash. Once we saw how Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion can integrate—well, that was the breakthrough we were looking for. We could single-source the content, lock down a very attractive design—and save ourselves a lot of license fees in the process."
In just three months, the five-person team, researched, redesigned, and rebuilt the Westminster site, which is currently more than 2,000 pages. "We're an academic institution, so that makes the three-month cycle all the more impressive," Ross noted. "And the reason for this speed is definitely ColdFusion. If we needed to, we could build a robust application very quickly. For example, our financial aid group asked us for a small application and we gave it to them in 48 hours. We're a support department for the College and—with ColdFusion, our ability to support them is just tremendous.
"Dreamweaver proved to be a valuable tool for site design. We also really like the ability of Macromedia Flash to support ActionScripting of XML objects. And we also enjoy the support of the entire Macromedia development community which has offered us lots of useful tips to handle different challenges."
Integration of Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion
Ross and the team constructed a site that extensively uses Macromedia Flash for its interface. "We have a heavily parameterized Macromedia Flash interface," said Williams. "
If you looked at the source, you wouldn't necessarily know what you're looking at. For example, you might see just a generic button that is actually being populated and duplicated dynamically from the ColdFusion-managed database."
Another objective of the new system was to overhaul how different contributors across the college could submit and update their content. "We built some simple HTML forms that any contributor can use to change the content," Ray said. "This is a custom back-end content contribution system that uses LDAP for user authentication and WDDX packets for pulling data from a MySQL database tables directly into dynamic Macromedia Flash text fields.
"But with this site, they can only edit text. They don't need to know HTML, properties, colors, frames—just their own textual content. They can put content on the site immediately—no muss, no fuss—but they can't change the layout or any aspect of the visual interface. That helps us adhere to a single design across the site. In the case of our library staff and our career center, we did give them a bit more leeway—they're constantly changing pages and adding information, so they have a little more control than others. Our site gives us that control and flexibility, which we really like."
Return on Investment and Impressive Traffic Increases
Since the new site rolled out Westminster has seen significant site traffic—and achieved a healthy ROI as well. Today, www.westminstercollege.edu accommodates between 20,000 - 30,000 unique visitors a month, with seasonal and time-of-day spikes and troughs. Many visitors are high school students using the site to conduct their preliminary screen of colleges before returning to complete their online admissions application.
Currently Westminster receives over 30% of their total applications online. Since the inception of the new website, monthly online applications have risen by 68%. Taking into account that there are seasonal booms and busts for applications, and that each generation of prospective students seems to be more computer friendly, in general, Westminster is seeing a strong increase in online applications.
"The surveys we've done with prospective students have been very positive," Ross noted. "We wanted to convey the true sense of our college and our campus. And I think the visual Macromedia Flash elements have really enabled us to do that. It's accurately portraying what our institution is like—which is a tremendous help in the recruitment process."
From an ROI perspective, Ross is equally enthusiastic about the Macromedia platform for Westminster's site. "We already owned Macromedia Flash, ColdFusion, and Dreamweaver, so our expenses were strictly man hours," he said.
"We haven't formally calculated our ROI, but I can confidently say that a cursory analysis would show a savings of many tens of thousands of dollars over the commercial solutions we evaluated. Another key benefit comes from streamlining. With TeamFusion we had to individually train non-IT staff in its use, provide ongoing support when they had questions and problems, manually review their work and correct technical errors they introduced, and then publish their content. Many times the IT department was actually a bottleneck in the process because we had to spend so much time checking people's work.
"With Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion, we've created a tight, consistent layout and empowered our users to add and edit content immediately without impacting the site's design and without waiting for IT to 'get around to it.' We've saved a tremendous amount of time, and my staff can focus on application development and design rather than outside problem resolution.
"Plus, we have direct control over the entire solution—which we wouldn't have with a commercial product. With Macromedia, we built it, we own it, we know it, we've mastered it, and we can take it in any direction we like."
Site Summary
Westminster College
1840 South 1300 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84105
· Macromedia products:
Macromedia ColdFusion Studio; Macromedia ColdFusion Server, Enterprise Edition; Macromedia ColdFusion Server, Professional; Macromedia Flash; Dreamweaver
· Hardware:
Development server: IBM Netfinity 5000, dual-processor, 384MB RAM
Production server: IBM eServer x330, Pentium III 1.2GHz, 1 Gig of RAM
· Operating system:
Development and Production servers: RedHat Linux 7.2
Authoring client PCs: Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP
· Database:
MySQL 3.23.x
· Size of DB:
Table sizes range from a dozen rows to as many as 10,000
· Internet Connection:
Dual T1s through Utah Education Network
· Development Team:
5 full-time developers
· Site Traffic:
20,000 - 30,000 unique visitors a month
· Benefits of Macromedia:
-
· Rapid Development—Built a complete site in three months, smaller applications in as little as 48 hours.
· Power—"Hands-down, ColdFusion is an extremely powerful development tool."
· Integration of Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion—Westminster's site has a Macromedia Flash UI dynamically populated with data from ColdFusion.
