Why, whatever do I mean?
At work we've been trying to introduce lighter options for helping faculty communicate. Although we have a more heavy-weight option, faculty have requested a simpler setup, one that enables them to interact with their audiences more easily.
My first reaction was: What does that *even* mean?
I had to put aside my programmer brain for a minute, but then I realized they meant that there was too much ceremony in the way and they wanted less fancy graphics and more communications in their blog. Or, put another way, the signal-to-noise ratio was too high for their liking.
Now if you've ever worked at a university, you know that many of the things we do aren't tied to a reason, but rather a policy. Sometimes the policies have good reasons, and sometimes... well, not so much.
Heck, in this case it's not even a policy, since policy has a very specific set of requirements in order to be a policy. However, for our uses policy gets the idea across.
Anyway, so we have a policy that says we should use a specific template to maintain branding identity, uniformity, and a myriad of other good goals. But, like many good things, a bit too much is still a bit too much. So we have faculty who would like to reach out to the people they're supposed to help and provide benefits to, but feel restricted and impared by the systems that are supposed to enable those very efforts. It's enough to make a person need a lie down.
So what was the solution? I mean we need the less ceremony solution, but we need to main the policy happy at the same time.
What we did was redesign the (very) desktop-centric, graphics heavy template into a light weight, html5-based RWD-infused wordpress template. Backed by Zurb's Foundation we started with an article forward mentality, since the information was key. We kept the graphics to a minimum with a icon set for most social media options and clean markup.
The whole process is based on a grunt task runner setup that allows us to tweak Zurb's sass layout, recompile to css, and then (optionally) update the dev or prod instances. The grunt task also includes an live demo site with a dummy layout so we can check things on the local developers machine before trying to go to dev. This has probably saved us a million headaches, but since we're not having them, it's hard to count!
Is it perfect? No, far from it. But is it better? Oh my yes. Miles and miles better. You can interact usefully on a phone, which easily opens up another communication channel and because we're text-centric, makes a lighter payload for those users.
Want to discus what we did and how we went about it?
Just shoot me an email, catch me on IRC, or hit me up on twitter.