The Offices of Information Technology Services and Marketing Communications collaborated last year to create Web Profile Manager (WPM), a new Web content management system aimed at guaranteeing that information on our academic web pages is current and accurate.
The system was made available to departments and faculty last fall, and they've been working since then to create their sites through the profile manager. Their new sites launched this past Monday, and they'll continue to use the manager to make changes and updates to their profiles.
Departments will find that maintaining their sites will be much easier with WPM, which requires no special programming skills. The system pulls appropriate information from centrally maintained databases into each site, ensuring that each department has current program descriptions, faculty lists, and contact and catalog information. Departments use WPM to create their own pages and to link to other sites, and several special features allow them to add photo galleries easily, to share documents, and to feature sections within the site. The new department sites are linked from their school sites and from the site index.
Below are two department sites that illustrate the potential of the new system:
Similarly, faculty members can use WPM to create their own sites. At a minimum each faculty member now has a page that lists his or her basic directory information. However, all faculty members are encouraged to add additional information about themselves. Here are a couple excellent examples of faculty sites made using the WPM:
Each faculty member's profile is linked from the appropriate school and department sites, the online directory, and the comprehensive list of the College's faculty, Ithaca College Faculty
The Web Profile Manager project was a major undertaking for the ITS and marcom offices. Many staff hours were put into it, and many more will be spent maintaining it and adding new features as universal needs arise. We believe the WPM is a great step forward toward ensuring that visitors to our site can easily find current and accurate information about the College and its academic programs.
If you have any questions or comments about the new system, contact Benjamin Costello , Joanne Hindman , or your marketing communications manager (Swee Wong or Laurie Ward ).
Contributed by Tom Torello
