Attend a workshop; your users will thank you

At Millersville we use a decentralized content management model, distributing the responsibility of updating web content to individual departments and employees across the University. This provides subject matter experts the opportunity to publish their own content, increasing the quality and relevancy of information we present. On the flipside, it means that people who specialize in many different areas are now tasked with “designing” their sites, something that most may not be familiar with.

To help support our campus community, the web team offers trainings, as well as “workshops” regularly to all of our CMS users.

What is a Cascade workshop?

Our workshops are a chance to get hands-on help with your website. For the scheduled hour, we will sit down with you and work together on your site. This provides an opportunity for you to ask questions, as well as for us to share ideas or suggest possible improvements.

Some areas we commonly address are:

  • Overall layout and design
  • Accessibility
  • Fixing broken links
  • Restructuring navigation

Please note: Cascade Workshops are not the same as Cascade Trainings. We suggest attending a training session prior to a workshop to gain a basic understanding of Cascade CMS.

A simple case study

The following example shows a page on the Millersville website before and after one of our workshop sessions.

The original page is very text-heavy and long. A visitor to this page may feel overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of text, as well as lack of visual elements providing incentive to read the content.

Example of a page before and after being worked on in a Cascade Workshop

By distributing the content logically between multiple pages, and using our existing page components, we were able to create a layout that is visually pleasing and provides a good user experience for our web viewers.

Where do I sign up?

Workshops are currently held monthly. You can sign up by submitting a Help Desk request.

The content of this blog entry was accurate at the time of publication. You can find the most current information about pages, components, and other Cascade-related topics in our Cascade wiki documentation.


Up next:

  • Suggest topics for 2020

Upcoming training sessions:

  • Wednesday, December 18 @ 10 a.m.

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