03 Oct 08 Website Update

As you may be aware, we unveiled our newly redesigned website with a brand new information architecture on Monday, September 22nd, 2008. As with many projects of this scale, some glitches have arisen as a result of the transition. A few items tested before go-live surprised us by breaking after go-live, causing a great deal of grief for everyone involved.

ITTS has been addressing the following items since the launch:

E-Commerce & Login Issues

• Some people who were joining, renewing, donating or registering received error messages at the very end of the process.
• Double log-ins were required when renewing.

Members-only content

• Log in for members-only content looped some people around.

Google Search

• The Google search appliance had to be cleared of its indexing of the staging site, and re-set to crawl the new site before it could give useful results.

Redirects & Content Services Switch

• Some of our sites with their own domain names made changes to their home page that required updating the content services switch.
• In an effort to reduce the number of redirects in use on site, we are reviewing, pruning, and renewing redirects as appropriate.

Shadow Assets (fixing broken links)

• This is an ongoing process. The content management system identifies broken internal links for maintenance by the appropriate unit staff.

We’re experiencing some stability issues with one of our web servers and are devoting as many resources as possible to this problem. While working to solve the problem, we’re monitoring the server closely to minimize service interruptions.

We have successfully addressed the e-commerce, log in, and search engine issues. We continue to refine redirects and resolve broken links. We’re still researching the members-only issue, which no longer loops people around.