Big Sandy
On Our Way
Big Sandy Community and Technical College is excited to be working on launch of our new web site. We believe that the new site will be a powerful tool for our students, visitors, faculty, staff, and community, a tool of superb quality that reflects the quality of education available at BSCTC and KCTCS.
With the new site, we will be creating a web presence that is easy to use, visually pleasing, and a much better representation of life at our college while at the same time providing the same wealth of information and access of our current web site.
The Reason We Do What We Do
All of this work, of course, is because of our ongoing commitment to provide our audiences with the best possible services, information and tools on our web sites. It's why we've thoroughly researched our audience's needs and expectations. It's why we seek to follow best practices, from how we architect our sites, to graphic design, to writing content in ways that appeal to our target audiences. It's why we've invested in tools like Sitecore to help us do our best, in the very best ways possible.
And it's why our jobs are never "done," because we're always looking for ways to improve how our web sites meet and exceed the expectations of all our audiences--our students, employees, communities ...and you!
FAQs
When is the new site coming?
We are on track to launch in late summer 2009. As we get closer to launch, we'll share more specific timeline information.
Is everything on the BSCTC web site going to be moved to the new platform at launch?
Not right away. The initial Sitecore implementation will focus on the top 100 pages of the web site. These are the most visited and most critical pages for our audiences. The goal of these initial launches is to lay the infrastructure for a much-improved web presence. It will take quite a bit longer to migrate the thousands of other pages on our web sites. Migration of other pages will happen over a period of many months, as training and migration planning are completed. These legacy pages will remain available however from the new web site, so our existing content will not simply disappear at launch.
Will I need to change my bookmarks/favorites?
Depending on what it is, you probably will. Content will be moving to different URLs (web addresses), so your bookmarks may change. We will attempt to automatically redirect as many old URLs as possible to the new ones, which should make this easier for you. Many internally-oriented pages will be moving to thePoint, so there will be some changes.
With the improved navigation on our new site, plus an improved search engine and a "what's changed" page, we hope the transition will be a fairly smooth one.
Is every college web site going to look just like BSCTC?
Nope! Every site will have common elements so that all will be recognizable as part of the same KCTCS family--also, there is an approved System-wide set of design guidelines that will apply to every site. There is a great deal of flexibility within this framework. Each web site will have its own design that reflects local preferences and respects the unique identity of the college.
Who updates our new web site?
As we launch our new web site, we will be allowing people to become content owners and authors. Content owners and authors will be responsible for updating the sections of the site where they are an expert. That means that the people who best understand the content are the people who are updating in for our sites and that means the information on our sites is more accurate.