Early Web Project

The College of Communication Arts & Sciences at Michigan State University, with its diverse curriculum in the Departments of Advertising, Audiology & Speech Sciences, Communication, Telecommunication, and the School of Journalism, was in need of a new web identity in Summer 1998. In an effort to bring consistency and a contemporary look and feel to the College and its internal departments, the Comm Tech Lab was hired to design, develop, and maintain the Colleges new web presence.

ROLE

My primary role on the project was that of project manager. At the onset of the project, I worked with a committee including the dean, the five department chairs and a few others, to define the goals, scope, and budget of the project. Throughout the project, I communicated with the committee to keep them up-to-date on our status. I worked with Kurt Besecker, the creative director and information designer on the project, and Christy King, the content liaison, to create the actual sites. In addition to managing the team, I setup the servers, backend systems, and wrote programs to automate several aspects of the sites creation.

The new sites were launched on August 27, 1999. Afterwhich, I continued to maintain the sites, keep the information fresh, and add new features until 2001 when I became an assistant professor (and Peter Maziak took over as project manager for this project.)

VIEW THE WORK

The sites maintained the same basic design until 2005, when they were updated to modern web standards. The (updated) College Web site is available at http://cas.msu.edu. The department sites are accessible via the college site.