CSC Website Tour

Posted on by ConnorsStateAdmin

The new CSC website has been available for a over a week now and most visitors have been able to find what they need much easier. We are still working improve the content of the main site while migrating and updating the sub-sites to the new format. With all the recent changes, many of you may have not had the time to browse through the site and discover some of the new features.

Lets take a quick tour:

Main Navigation

The difficult to navigate menus from the old site were useful if you knew exactly where you wanted to go, but were often unhelpful if you did not.

The Top menu on the website has always contained the links to the various departmental pages, documents and resources but finding the link you were looking for was sometimes difficult because while the menus where broken up into broad unordered categories, the information was presented in a unstyled, multi level list that was difficult to read and hard to navigate because often the links were buried under multiple layers.
For the new site, we styled the links inside the menu so we can have several categories and columns of links presented without a lot of extra hunting for that the old menus became known for. The transparency was also removed because while it made the overall look of the site flashier, it sometimes made the text difficult to read depending on the background.

The new menu displays its sub-categories next to each other, making it easier to locate a specific item.

Easy Access Buttons

We changed a lot of things about the Connors website but early on we decided that the orange buttons from the old site needed to stay. They provided an easy way for visitors to get where they needed to go quickly without searching the entire page just to find the link to their email. We took this idea an expanded on it. On the old website, these buttons only appeared on the front page so if you visited the home page, clicked on something and the wanted access to these buttons, you had you go back to the home page to find them or locate them in the top dropdown menu. On the new site they appear on every page so you can get where you need to go quickly no matter where you are on the site.


The Easy Access Buttons now appear on every page of the site.

Tooltips

Another issue was visitors could usually figure out that an icon with an envelope on it was for email, or could read C-Key or SIS right on the button but how do you explain a stack of books or a question mark without cluttering up the page with a bunch of text? The answer of course was [tooltip content=”Tooltips! Help you identify something before you click it!” url=”” ]Tooltips[/tooltip]. This allows  you to see what something is without leaving the page you are on. You will find them used throughout the entire site. If you see something and don’t know what it is, hover over it and find out.  If you don’t get a explanation, check your browsers status bar near the bottom of the screen or Send an E-Mail to the CSC Webmaster and tell them to add an explanation to that item.

Directory

Connors now has an employee directory built right into the top menu so you can quickly find an email address and/or Office phone number or location from any page on the CSC website. Just enter the first and/or last name, narrow your results by department and click search. You’ll be taken to a page list of search results.

Search by first or last name or see a full department listing from any page on the website.

Clicking on a persons name takes you to their full information sheet, Clicking on their department name will display all the members of their department.
If the person you were searching for isn’t on your list, you can expand your search by enabling Partial name matches. Many more features will be added to this section of the site so please check back for updates.NOTE: a similar directory is available for students but for privacy reasons, only displays their name and email address.

Partial name matching can help you locate someone if you don't know the exact spelling of their name.

Calendar

[smallcalendar listtype=13 tz=Europe/Belfast show_month_nav=1 agenda=n  more_url=http://connorsstate.edu/calendar/ http://connorsstate.edu/calendars/Academic_Calendar_Calendar.ics http://connorsstate.edu/calendars/Baseball_Fall_2011_Calendar.ics] The CSC website has had a calendar for years but it was maintained by several different departments, all at different intervals with no central point of contact for individuals to contact to have their event added to the calendar. the new CSC calendar is updated many times every day. This makes it much more reliable than the old calendar. If you need to add/change an event contact Carla Goodwin.

Maps

The campus map now displays all buildings and most of the routes through campus.
 We now have detailed maps of the Connors Campuses available by clicking on the campus addresses in the footer. You can also visit connorsstate.edu/maps on directly for you smartphone. Building interior maps and a full campus tour is in the works and will be added to the site when available.

 

Thank you for taking the time to learn the features of the new site. We appreciate all the feedback we have received regarding the new site and welcome you to send your comments or ideas you have for changes or future improvements to cscwebmaster@connorsstate.edu.