Mobile design needs to stop being an afterthought and start being the default. In this presentation, web developers Brent Swisher and Daniel Slaughter will cover why and how Grand Valley State University implemented their in-house responsive Content Management System. The developers will discuss some of the ways the CMS was structured to make mobile-friendly sites the new standard at GVSU. Major design concepts will be covered, including the decision to break website content into “chunks” that can scale between desktop, tablet, and mobile. They will also discuss some of the challenges encountered when working with the university as a whole, and how they helped GVSU shift from a desktop-only to mobile-friendly approach.

1. Making Mobile
the Default
Brent Swisher and Daniel Slaughter
Grand Valley State University

2. The Web Team

3. CMS 3++

5. Brainstormed

6. ● Pre-Built Content Templates
● Easier way to layout content
● Save pages as Draft
● More flexibility in header images
● Automatic Photo Resizing
● And 65 other things...
What They Wanted

7. ● Mobile Friendly
● Force usability best practices
○ Navigation Items
○ Content Hierarchy
● Maintain Similar URLs for SEO
● Easier for developers (us!) to write custom
forms
What We Wanted

8. Go!

9. Content Chunks (Admin)
DEMO

10. Content Chunks (Public)
DEMO

11. Navigation
● Looked at CMS 3 to see number of items
● Attempted to limit based on usability
guidelines
● Horizontal vs. Vertical Navigation
● How we helped out users
○ Card Sorts
○ http://www.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort.htm

12. ● Automatic image
resizing
● Tags, not folders
● Multiple image
sizes for different
resolutions
File Assets

13. Involvement

14. Alumni Relations CMS
● Their old website
had a custom
layout
● They were using
custom functionality
we needed to
account for

15. Alumni Relations CMS
● Using the default
CMS4 template,
their new website
was bold, had
showcased
features up front,
and was mobile
friendly

16. ● 6 Initial Seminars
● Helped us see
people’s feedback
immediately
● Created a YouTube
video
Training Sessions
http://gvsu.edu/s/Dp

17. Adoption Statistics

18. Difficulties

19. That’s Neat!

20. ● User driven Q&A
● Anyone can ask
questions or answer
them
● Web Team can
promote answers
CMS Help

21. ● On every page
● Allows anyone to
report an issue
● Automatically
contacts the site’s
administrators
Report a Problem

22. Helpful Tools
● CKEditor.com
● jQuery.com
○ Datepicker
● Bootstrap
● Responsive Image Gallery
● Google Analytics
● Reinvigorate

23. Questions?

24. Thank You
Brent Swisher
swisherb@gvsu.edu
@brentswisher
Daniel Slaughter
slaughda@gvsu.edu
@danielslaughter