The days fly by like black squirrels

I thought maybe I'd be posting every day. Fortunately, I haven't had time; I've been too busy talking to a string of intelligent, thoughtful, unconventional and humane Haverford students. Already it is Thursday!

We are in the Dining Center today, since they're using the main green for an alumni event (with a tent). But you should have seen our mobile office!

We'll post a raft of photos and conclusions when we get home. Thanks to everyone who's come by to see us!

Calendar for the week

Jenn at Haverford (with two N's, as opposed to Jen from White Whale) has created a Google Calendar for the Residency. You can check it out here (link revised so it doesn't require Google registration).

The forum rumbles to life

We now have a forum in Haverford's Go Boards, and some students are starting to put some great ideas out there about what we should do with the Haverford site.

Because the forum is for Haverfordians only, I thought I'd just list some of the ideas coming out of the forum here. We've already agreed that our scope on this job is basically unlimited--- we'll create whatever features Haverford decides they need--- so this is the beginning of the list.

1. Bold color scheme (though avoiding an overly dark palette)
2. Short video reflections or interview clips
3. A comprehensive and easy-to-use calendaring system, "something that all of Haverford's departments can update to, with full descriptions of events, and that can be sorted and searched -- for speakers, for times, for workshops, for plays, for anything that's going on" (as Justin put it)
4. E-mailing students when they've received a package in the mailroom
5. Personal web pages for Haverford students that are templated and easy to set up
6. A virtual tour that allows for wandering and independent exploration
7. A search feature that, quite simply, works
8. More consistency among departmental websites
9. A design driven by campus photography

And that's just the first day's worth! Thanks to Benjamin, Will, Justin and Geddes for their posts.

Counting down to the 25th

We kick off our own preparation for the Residency in earnest this Monday at 9am. But I sent this tentative schedule to Jenn Patton at Haverford today. We will be having open meetings all week---- anyone who wants a meeting can sign up for one--- but the following describes our grand plan for each day.

Monday: the Kickoff
Does anyone have a hammer? Where is the coffee? What are you people doing here?

Setup day. We'll start in the morning, and ideally we'll have everything set up and ready to go by the early afternoon. We'd like to have an official kickoff meeting in the afternoon---- perhaps around 4---- where we'll introduce ourselves, talk about the project, hand out some handouts, etc.

Tuesday: the Landscape
Where does Haverford fit into the marketplace? What schools' websites are worthy of emulation? In the broadest sense, what do we want the Haverford site to be, and not to be?

Open meetings:
1) Review of peer schools' websites (and other university websites too)
2) What is wrong (and right) with the current Haverford site?

Wednesday: the Life
What are the most important things about Haverford to communicate to prospective students? What surprised you when you came to Haverford?

Open meetings:
1) What sort of Virtual Tour would work best for Haverford?
2) What do you look for in a school's site when you're applying to college?

Thursday: the Geek Summit
What PHP settings most effectively prevent SQL-injection attacks? Is cross-browser-compatible PNG transparency possible? (hint: yes)

Everything technical is reserved for this day, when both our programmer/developers (Alex and Donald) will be in town. We envision a series of technical meetings on this day:

1) News management across the site
2) Calendaring / events management solutions
3) Content management
4) A demo (by Haverford students for WW) of go.haverford.edu (front and back end)

Friday: the Big Finish
What have we learned, kids?

Wrapup. Summary of the ideas we've developed. Maybe a show of hands for various options that have been discussed during the week. Formation (if possible) of student consulting teams that we'll check in with once a month.

Concept becomes reality

The idea of the mobile outdoor office space for the Residency began in a rental car. On our way back to the airport from an early meeting at Haverford, the notion of our company spending a week on campus began to take shape. And somewhere along the line, an image emerged: a strange, conspicuous red shape in the middle of Haverford's unfathomably lovely campus and Quaker architecture.

And now, although it's hard for me to believe it, we are actually going to build a 15'-diameter mobile office space, out of a lovely red vinyl mesh fabric, that will roll up and stick in the back of a U-Haul. The fabric has been ordered; a color has been chosen; and the folks at Renaissance Creative Imaging have taken on the job of bringing this weird structure to life. It's one thing to sketch out something like that (see the post below); it's entirely another to see it actually being brought to life. Exciting and terrifying.

Schematics

Click here (PDF) to see the first schematics we've created for the outdoor office space we'll be working in on Haverford's main green.

And we're off!

This weblog will track the planning, preparation and progress of something White Whale has never tried before---- the fact is, we're not sure that anyone has tried it. As the first major step toward our upcoming redesign of the Haverford College Web site, we are moving our whole company to the Haverford campus for a week in late September, where we will work from 9 to 5 on Haverford's site as well as our other client work. We'll be living on campus, and all our time outside of work will be spent soaking up Haverford's unique vibe.

We have big plans: tons of meetings, a photo booth, cricket lessons, CSS workgroups, a virtual tour collaboration/competition, a karaoke contest, and... did I mention lots of meetings? It's going to be a great week: we expect to have a lot of fun and get a lot of work done, and that's about all you can ask for from a job, right?

We'll try to keep this blog updated as much as possible; I'm a worker, not a blogger, but I'll try to make posting here a part of the job. Ideally we'll be posting planning documents, shopping lists, photographs, and Lord knows what else, especially as we get closer and closer to the residency itself. Watch this space!

Jason Pontius
Boss
White Whale Web Services, Inc.