A long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away….

Well, not quite. This story starts about a year ago in the Administration Building. Kate and I were at the beginning of a project to update the copyright website, and our first challenge was to figure out how to start. I found a “goals interview” to do with Kate, which included questions such as:

1. What are your top goals for the site?
2. What are the most common complaints you get about the current website or content you have online?
3. What do you want users to do on your website or as a result of visiting your site?

One key goal for the new website was to make it more user friendly. After determining our goals, it became possible for us to lay out the tasks we needed to do to transition from the old site to the new site. For example, we thought a lot about how to decrease wordiness, which meant deleting “click here” from every other sentence.

My only knowledge of the workings of the internet came from watching The Matrix trilogy, Hackers (not sure if that even counts) and Halt and Catch Fire, but I’m no Cameron (Cameron is a rad tech genius from Halt and Catch Fire). I knew I had to do some further investigation on the subject.

We devised a plan, and slowly but surely tackled our project, page by page, section by section. We printed, cut out and reorganized the existing copyright website pages, and added new content as we went. It was especially fun to predict what we thought the new homepage should look like (Ms. Cleo has the answers).

We reviewed external sites and U of S sites for inspiration. Shout out to the UBC Copyright site and the U of S Teaching and Learning site, from which we got many good ideas.

I learned about content management, content inventory, and gap analysis via Lynda.com. We used the white board, created excel spreadsheets, and became intimately familiar with Cascade. I pushed my creative limits to the edge and opened Photoshop. We ran the gamut of every tool and person in our arsenal.

And here we are today, just a little bit over a year later, with a new site that we are both very proud of – https://library.usask.ca/copyright/. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed reimagining it. But, by no means is our adventure over. We hope to add more images, instructional videos, Prezi presentations and infographics in the near future.

Thanks again to anyone and everyone who helped us to launch this new-and-improved copyright website!