Colorado Academy for Lifelong Learning - Site Redevelopment

Background on the Academy Website

Ever since March of 2003 The Colorado Academy for Lifelong Learning has maintained a strong presence on the internet. Their site provides many functions for the group:

• Background explanation of the Academy, its origin, and its goals
• Information about the upcoming Courses, the Facilitators, and Class Schedules
• A listing of books and other materials required for the courses
• Historical information about previous years of courses
• Photo Galleries

This system worked fine for the Academy during their early years as they were growing. Manually building the pages in Microsoft FrontPage was a relatively cheap solution that provided decent results. As the group grew editing information on the site become a larger task and eventually the Academy hired website consultants to update the site. This system worked, but was still limiting because of the cost associated with each update and the limited number of people who could add content to the site.

Site Goals

The original set of goals for the Academy were pretty simple:

• Keep all of the current content of the site and, as necessary, reorganize it to be easy to find.
• Modify the navigation so that links to all important pages are accessible regardless of the current page being visited
• Make the visual design uncomplicated and large enough for the older audience of the Academy
• Reduce the effort in updating the site each semester

User research performed by Growing Venture Solutions revealed that nearly a third of the visitors to the site were using 800x600 monitors - a relatively small size that required special care so that the site is still usable for that group. Another surprising discovery from the research was that almost a third of the visitors are on dialup connections so the site is an attempt to balance friendly photos with sensitivity for dialup.

Additional Features:

Additionally several new features were added as part of this project.

• Allow Board members to write about news of the Academy as a form of marketing
• Provide discussion forums where members can discuss specific topics selected by a site administrator
• Allow course Facilitators to host online discussion groups where they can answer questions from students outside of class and also provide relevant links and files for reading (e.g. course handouts)
• Provide an image gallery that allows easy uploading of photos
• Track site visitors to understand how they found the site, why they are visiting, what browser technology they are using to improve decision making in future upgrades.

Final Results

The final site is still being rolled out to the users, but the Director of Academy commented:

"We are so excited about the new site! This update will reduce our workload, give a consistent look and feel for the future, provides a more professional image gallery. It makes it easier for our Board to announce news about the organization. The discussion forums and course groups provide the cutting edge of educational software to a previously underserved group."