This blog post is based on presentations that we gave at the AAMC Group on Information Resources in December 2022 and the Building Bridges conference in August 2022.
Did you miss Part 1? Read it here to learn why we built the website and the timeline for the project.
Requirements
The goal for this project was to have a site that was dynamic, modular, and consistent across 150+ pages.
With our backgrounds in web development and publishing, we knew how vital it would be to have efficiency built into every aspect of the site—making manual changes over more than a handful of pages would quickly spiral out of control. Furthermore, we built in standards to reduce frequent decision-making, so we could get the work done quickly no matter who was working on the site. It was important to be able to apply the same styles to text (headers, paragraphs, call to action), images, and widgets like the table of contents.
We also had to be thoughtful about being manual vs. dynamic. It wasn’t practical to create each page from scratch (manually). We needed the ability to tell a page when to have certain elements (dynamic), like a table of contents or a large image at the top with a title. We needed the ability to create page templates.
Our tools
Let's use a real world example.
You go to the post office to pick up a package in your name. In order to get the package, you have to show some sort of ID to prove your identity. If your mom goes in to get the package, she won't be able to, because she doesn't meet the post office's condition—she needs to be you.
We needed to create a more complex way of categorizing and sorting our pages.
Taxonomies give us a way to create lists of items or content that we want to group together—think of them as buckets. When you looked up something up on a clothing website, they use what is called a taxonomy (a way of naming, describing, and classifying content on a website) to help you find what you’re looking for. The top-level taxonomy might be shoes, and terms within that taxonomy are things like sneakers, pumps, sandals, etc. An item or content can belong to more than one taxonomy—sneakers would fall under the shoe taxonomy, and they could also fall under another taxonomy such as gender or sale.
Guess what? This can be done, using a plugin! We installed Custom Post Type UI, which allows us to create taxonomies and terms that belong to them (think back to shoe taxonomy terms: sandals, running shoes, sneakers).
Without getting too much in depth, Elementor has dynamic content, which is used in templates. For example, let’s say you have a page with a title. In order to have the title change for each new page, you need the ability to make that title dynamic. We found a plugin to achieve this: Advanced Custom Fields, which allows us to adjust the content for each page, such as the title, using simple form fields. This is great because it works hand in hand with our templates and allows us to use that same template over and over without changing the template or creating a new one.
by the Office of Technology