The Bulletin Online
As a print publication, The Bulletin helps support UScience's mission of engaging alumni audiences, industry partners, and university constituencies through sharing stories, research breakthroughs, profiling distinguished students, and providing updates on the latest campus news. Furthering this goal, I approached a complete reimagining of the digital edition of The Bulletin Online in 2017, bringing the site out of an external blogging platform and into our new website's CMS.
Challenges
The previous website for The Bulletin Online had been hosted on Typepad.com and lacked a variety of features that alumni had come to expect from an online alumni magazine. Publishing the online edition was also tedious, so finding ways to streamline the publishing process was crucial, and further, the finished product looked dated and was neither accessible nor mobile friendly.
Solutions
A visual redesign was approached with the intent of giving The Bulletin Online a modern look and feel that slightly echoed qualities of the print edition:
- Flexible content regions were designed that could support multiple layout styles and positionings as well as unique background and foreground colors.
- Layouts were standardized to provide a consistent experience across editions
- Additional CSS design touches were added for extra impact and effect.
The Publishing process was cut in half due to creative data management solutions and integration with existing resources:
- Articles for each edition of the magazine were already published within the CMS as general news stories. Therefore, news items on the landing page were designed to simply link out to existing content.
- Unique CTAs were embedded into news articles which were featured in each Bulletin Online edition, serving the purpose of promoting content cross-site as well as allowing users to navigate back to the Bulletin Online landing page.
- Each digital edition is preserved within its own directory, allowing for the persistence of past editions while avoiding any conflicts with content or URLs of new editions.
New Class Notes/In Memoriam features were developed with searchability, data integrity, and ease of editing in mind:
- Class note submissions are a fixture of any alumni magazine but collecting and easily publishing this information had been difficult in the past due to lack of data management.
- Using a relational database solution was not possible here so an accessible process was developed to create a pseudo-database, taking advantage of Google Sheets for data collection and editing. Complete spreadsheets were then rendered to XML and XSLT transformations were designed to manipulate the information, presenting it on the webpage similarly to how it appeared in the print edition.
Visit The Bulletin Online