Skidmore Campus Tour
01 Challenge
Prospective students of a prominent liberal arts college come to check out the college’s website. How can you show maps of the college campus and local area that are so rich in information, helpful, and absolutely cool, that the student decides, there and then, to pay the college a visit?
Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, New York, is a highly selective liberal arts college with a reputation for creativity and innovation, and the slogan Creative Thought Matters®.
Andrew Camp, Director of Web Communications at Skidmore, wanted the Virtual Skidmore maps to be not only interactive, showing multiple views of a building or location, but dynamic, allowing constant automatic updating events calendars or class schedules associated with that building. Virtual Skidmore had to fit within the existing site structure, and match its style and color scheme. Andy and his team had to be able to easily add or remove interactive buttons to the campus, local, or regional maps, and then load multiple images, movies, events and departments associated with them.
02 Solution
Features on the campus map, like buildings, are marked with buttons. When a button is clicked it opens an information tag, that includes the name of the building, a photograph, and a short paragraph of descriptive text. Links may also allow you to open a photo gallery, a movie, or a list of departments, with links to their websites.
Dumbwaiter Design developed the front-end entirely in Adobe Flash. It takes formatted information directly from the Content Management System database. We tried to keep the site as flexible and foolproof as possible, to reduce content management system errors. The video and photo galleries read the media data to automatically scale images to fit the standard information tag size. We limited the number of words in each tag for the same reason. The search function allows the user to search through building titles and information tags.
We built the back end using a mix of Flash and HTML, to allow easy, intuitive editing. The authorized edit mode offers context-sensitive menus, through a right click on the site, to access and edit different features. So to add a photo in a building gallery, for example, you open the building, select a gallery, and right click on it, then upload the photograph.
03 Result
“We went to Dumbwaiter Design to do the programming,” said Andy Camp, “and they brought a fresh look at design (too).”
The site was featured on the Edustyle website, a web design gallery for higher education websites, in July. Twenty-five users described the Skidmore College Campus Map as My Style, and only two disagreed! Their comments are overwhelmingly positive. As one member said, “It’s great to see HigherEd going hip. Go Skidmore!”
Andy Camp successfully rolled out The Virtual Skidmore Campus Map, and is now working on Phase II with Dumbwaiter Design, to add new features, like blue light locations, handicapped access locations, an international map (Skidmore students currently hail from 32 countries) and RSS feeds of events for buildings.
