Tomorrow morning we will experience a change in our website. Higher Logic is updating its code base for all of its customers before the end of the month and we will be making this transition tomorrow morning. I will outline the main impacts below:
There will be a contemporary, more modern look and feel in general to ours sites and pages.
These changes will bring Higher Logic into the mobile friendly world, responsive design is the term of art today. This primarily means that the content will scale to fit the device used to access the website(s). It also improves Google metrics as they overweight this factor in website evaluation.
Another main impact will be improvement in navigation. There will be no left hand navigation in the new environment, eliminating one of the sore points we have had, seemingly random redirection, and mismatch between the top and left hand navigation. We have also rearranged the headers in the main navigation bar.
The responsive design will result in higher Google scoring for web metrics in addition to the increased mobile friendliness. This scoring is also impacted by the high number of microsites (websites) that we have that are underutilized or dormant. We are pruning these, eliminating the ones that have no use, and converting those that require community functions, mainly eGroup Discussion and Library access to these formats. The balance will be modified to conform to the new format.
This improved navigation and reduction in dead-ends is coupled with more dynamic information. This means fewer static pages to update translating into a better user experience and more accurate information.
We will work to minimize customization of features or elements where not required.
There will be no ecommerce changes, or changes to our technical content, nor any to our underlying NetForum membership database which we upgraded earlier this year. The shopping cart functions will not be affected.
There will be an immediate visual impact, and we will be ready to help people with questions about access that they may have. The design will be very simple to start and gives us a canvas from which we can work. We are in discussions with the EMC about how the staff and EMC members can work together to design the scheme in the best way. This work is an extension of what EMC has been doing very recently and can be the basis for our 'style guide' as discussed at the Council Retreat.
While we are bringing the content of our sites and pages forward we will be able to revisit these to take full advantage of this new presentation. This is the start of this process rather than the end.
As the transition is made we may experience some unusual behavior in some pages, but we expect this to be short-lived, perhaps an hour or so. We will announce this to the membership shortly after we go live, which should be before 1200 eastern time tomorrow. We will encourage feedback, ask for engagement with the EMC, and offer assistance to anyone who wants this.