2013 Annual Conference — October 6-9Beyond Herding Cats: Community and Consensus Building thru a Web Redesign
Ballroom
Very often, even the best website redesigns are a source of stress, strife and conflict. At Cardinal Stritch University we had a recipe for disaster: a new president, new VPs and C-level management, four deans who had very specific and occasionally conflicting goals, poor relationships and reputations with other departments, faculty and staff thoroughly disgruntled by past re-design experiences, no governance to speak of, scope creep of exponential magnitude (the re-design became a complete re-branding and ended up encompassing four complete sites) and a web team of one.
Contrary to expectations, however, we not only managed to complete the entire re-design of four websites and the re-branding of the university on time and on budget, but the resulting changes were enthusiastically adopted by our faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community. Additionally, the reputation of Web Communications was elevated throughout the university and bridges that had previously been burned were repaired.
How could we pull off that coup d'état in a landscape that was riven by dissent, disagreement and territorial in-fighting? Stop by and find out!
Presenter
Catherine Scholz
Digital Project Manager, Core Creative
Catherine Scholz has been in the web development industry for over 13 years. She started at Cardinal Stritch University in '09 and, after a year, decided to shake things up a bit. The end result was a re-designed website, a re-branded university, a Web Communications department, and a positive working relationship with all the departments at the university. After four happy years at Stritch, she moved out of higher ed and is now digital project manager for Core Creative.
