With our faculty/staff profiles mostly completed, we’ve kicked off the re-design of the CLAS site itself. That process will entail a complete web overhaul of all CLAS departments, centers, and institutes beginning with the parent clas.wayne.edu site.

Among many notable improvements, we will be segmenting current and future faculty-related websites (not profiles) onto an individualized platform to provide more flexibility and better address the diverse content needs specific to faculty related use.

For the purposes of this platform, faculty-related websites will consist of four formats:

• Personal faculty websites (e.g. clas.wayne.edu/hoffmann)
• Lab sites (e.g. clas.wayne.edu/balteslab)
• General blog for academic/research use
• Conference sites (e.g. clas.wayne.edu/nalhc)

The new faculty-related websites or “subsites” network will be powered by a system called WordPress. WordPress is the web’s leading content management system and allows you to create and edit websites. If you’ve used blogs.wayne.edu before to write a blog, you’ll be very familiar with this system; although, our version will be more expansive to encompass an entire website rather than just the blog portion.

The websites themselves, as of this writing, will be hosted at the URL, s.wayne.edu, where “s” denotes sites, e.g. s.wayne.edu/mywebsite. Should you choose, the new setup will also allow you to use a custom website (domain) name for your Wayne State hosted site, e.g. balteslab.com -> s.wayne.edu/balteslab – giving you a greater degree of customization.

Some of the benefits realized in this move to a new and separate system for our faculty-related subsites include:

• A greater degree of flexibility and autonomy than the one-size-fits-all model currently in place for the clas.wayne.edu sites. While we will still use a templated process in managing the sites hosted on the platform, by segmenting the needs of faculty sites from those of the college/department sites, we’ll be able to better tailor solutions to faculty-related use.
• Improved user-friendly interface. WordPress is one of the earliest and the most widely used systems employed to manage websites because of its intuitiveness and ease of use for the average website creator without requiring programming/designer knowledge.
• More robust. The new system will have a higher degree of reliability over our current one due to enterprise-grade hosting (greater speed, fewer outages, more space) and on-going maintenance/updates to the system provided through our new vendor. As the developers of the WordPress system continue to improve the platform, our system will regularly receive those iterative updates for the latest and greatest experience.
• More research. It’s our hope and intent that by providing an easy and effective platform for creating websites, faculty will be encouraged to share more research and invite their students/community for a deeper look into their on-going on-the-ground activities and insights.
• Keep your website. By segmenting the faculty-related sites from the CLAS sites, we will be able to implement future redesigns of clas.wayne.edu without having to touch the faculty-related sites as they’ll be independently managed. You’ll be able to keep your site as it is and where it is. Additionally, you’re welcome to keep your website live after your retire from the university.

We are currently developing guidelines and criteria that will govern our new faculty subsites for the best experience possible. This will include best practices, dos, don’ts, and what qualifies to have a subsite on the new network.

In general, active faculty sites currently on clas.wayne.edu will be migrated to the new s.wayne.edu network, whereby faculty can continue to maintain their site. Future faculty-related sites will be requested via the CLAS Marketing Team similar to the current process (contacting us at clas@wayne.edu).

When possible, we will do our best to rely on and integrate with other WSU systems (e.g. Formy, Qualtrics surveys, Blackboard) rather than trying to replicate a service or resource on the new subsites network. For example, if there is a particular function that we believe that Blackboard is better suited for, we will encourage and work with faculty to use that resource as opposed to recreating the same functionality in an adhoc web page on the new subsites network. This not only eliminates redundancy but also ensures a consistent experience for our students. Official program/department related information will continue to be hosted on the clas.wayne.edu departmental sites and platform.

If you have suggestions or feedback for the faculty-related subsites or just the overall CLAS website redesign in general, please let us know at clas@wayne.edu. We’re relying on our faculty and students to help us create the best experience possible. We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks as we move closer to implementation.

Mel Mills
CLAS Marketing Team