American Chemical Society
The Challenge
The American Chemical Society chose Stellent as the Web Content Management tool to use for revamping their expansive web site. With tens of thousands of pages of content, they needed to make sure that content contribution was as easy and straightforward as possible throughout the multi-stage creation, review, and publication cycle. While the content creation needed to be easy for end-users, internal standards mandated that the ultimate converted HTML had to be precise and meet their HTML code requirements.
Their web site is a host of many tools, and all content created needed to operate well within the existing environment, creating a bevy of questions about Stellent, its features, and ability to perform such a high-profile, high-demand task.
American Chemical Society called on Online Vitality to lead them through this massive undertaking and to create a solid, extensible foundation for their new web presence.
The Solution
We began this project with a series of aggressively scheduled demos and pilot projects. We used these as opportunities to showcase how the functionality of the Stellent Content Management system could be customized for the contributor experience as well as how the content could be integrated into the portal design. Through these demos, we were able to quickly and definitively put to rest questions about system interoperability and concerns over contribution methods
We worked directly with business leaders to review and educate them on Web Content Management best practices. Through these meetings, we designed a comprehensive WCM plan, encompassing metadata, contribution models, workflow, and publication cycles. With this foundation set, content creators at American Chemical Society were free to begin creating new content for the web site prior to the completion of development efforts.
Online Vitality led the development of several layout pages and reusable fragments within Site Studio. This toolset allowed us to rapidly develop and deploy new pages in the evolving site architecture. It also provided us with a consistency of output that allowed us to meet their web team’s standards of HTML compliance.
When the site was rolled out to content contributors, they found content creation to be quite easy. Content could be created in Microsoft Word and did not require any knowledge of web technologies in order to get content styled and web-ready. We also created a series of custom tools for managing rotating promotions, announcements, and other hot topics throughout the site.
We provided a series of administrative screens and reports to track content throughout the site and manage workflows. These tools prove invaluable for the ongoing maintenance of this expansive site.
American Chemical Society continues to grow and expand their usage of the Stellent Web Content Management system. Thanks to the ground work set by Online Vitality, this proves to be an easy, manageable, organic process of growth.