I was working as a student at Michigan State University’s Division of University Relations when the campus-wide project to rebuild MSU’s website occurred. Because University Relations was involved in the redesign, I had the opportunity to work with the designers that built the new site.
I did not design the site, nor did I build the final product, but during the conecpt stages I helped one of the designers build out her concept from a Photoshop file to a working web page.
I would have liked to have the opportunity to do more work on the site but there were designers available for that and there was no need for me to play any more than a supporting role.
I was able to do back-end support work for the development of the site, creating a content management system for sharing the information that would later be loaded on to the site.
The system stored multiple versions of each page, allowing the site’s editors to roll back to prevous versions if needed. As pages were completed, they could be marked as “complete” and moved to a new section where the site designers could get the content and add it to the site.
Along with this, the content manager kept track of the statistics related to the site. It reported the number of pages that were approved, the number of total pages, and the number of pages in each section of the site.
The content manager was also built in only a matter of days and modified on the fly, as the need for it wasn’t discovered until the last minute.
It was one of my favorite projects to work on, as I was basically told “This is what we need, we don’t care how you do it but make it happen.”
The above text was copied directly from my original portfolio as I imported it over to the blog. It was not updated for re-publishing.