If you’re a web designer of any kind you may be familiar with the well-known and unfortunate “rule” that your personal website is the last one to get updated. It flies in the face of logic: you should want your personal website to be the best, most amazing, and up-to-date things out there! It should represent you beautifully and wow all those who come looking for information about your work! Sadly our own sites often fall victim to the time and energy requirements of our other, more “official” clients.
Never has this been more true than with our parent site, oit.ncsu.edu. Hosted in Drupal and first launched in 2008 (when OIT was formed from a merger of campus units) this site has remained firmly fixed in place for more than 7 years. It did get a facelift in 2013 following some brand updates, but it was never properly cleaned up, reviewed or reorganized, and remained in an old version of Drupal.
We’re very happy to announce that today we have launched a brand new version of the OIT website: https://oit.ncsu.edu/. Built in WordPress and hosted in our cPanel environment, we’re finally making use of all the tools we’ve been offering to the rest of campus for 5+ years. The theme for the new site is a slightly customized version of our freely-available Hillsborough campus theme. We’re also happy to announce the first of the major OIT sub-sites, https://classtech.oit.ncsu.edu/.
It’s important that we heap praise and gratitude on all the folks who helped with this mammoth project. Our own Brian DeConinck was the project lead and showed stellar levels of patience with this process. We also need to thank David Mueller, our part-timer who took the lead in the content review and migration, as well as Thi Duong and Will Yoder, our interns who were also instrumental in the migration process. Many others were involved in content review, planning, site organization, etc., including Rhonda Greene, Charles Walker, Sarah Noell, Stan North Martin, and many more. And of course Chris and I assisted wherever we could and tried to keep the lights on as Brian descended into madness (Just kidding. He hasn’t been committed. Yet.).
Sometime in the new year, after Brian has stopped crying every time we mention the OIT site, we’ll get him to come on here and mention some of the incredible statistics for number of pages moved, links updated, and old content deleted. In the meantime we hope that you’ll take a look around the new site and let us know what you think. Unless you don’t like it, in which case please just hold your thoughts until after the holidays so we can get some rest.