We have launched a new Department Page builder for organizations that have many departments within their organizations who desire a clean and powerful design to present their content.
History and Purpose:
Many of our customers are larger cities and counties that are made up of many departments that operate independently, but who need a consistent look and feel, as well as a directory to browse all of the departments. For quite a long time, we have been researching the best way to design these "Department Pages" to make them look great, be easy to manage, and have a consistent solution for most of our customers.
During our research we found the website for Baltimore County Maryland, which won awards for being the best county website in the USA. An example of how that site shows a department well is their animal services department: https://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/Agencies/animalservices/index.html We like that site. A LOT. So we borrowed some ideas there for how the departments are laid-out, and we used that layout to create a new department page manager in our CMS.
How to Use The New Department Pages and Directory
All websites on our CMS have this new feature, and it is accessible using a new reserved URL. To view the new directory application, go to your website, and you add "/directory" to the end of your domain, you will see the department directory. Without adding details for each department, this directory will look a bit naked. Department content is added to this new department manager by clicking on the admin link at the top of the CMS, and then managing departments from the admin menu. Eventually, this department management will move into the CMS itself so that department heads will have quicker access to it to manage their departments directly.
New Content Ownership Strategy is Developing in the CMS
We looked at our CMS and asked how we could make it easier for departments to only see their content after logging in. We don't feel that it makes sense to force an employee to see all of the content in the website if they are only concerned with their own department's content. So to make this goal a reality, he have begun adding new fields to every application in the CMS, so that content can be "owned" by specific departments. You will notice, for example, when you edit a page that there is a new drop-down menu that enables you to select a department who owns the page you are editing. It is important for you to start choosing departments for all of your content as you go, because it will eventually affect department pages, the department directories, the navigation menus, and eventually the security of your website. If you have questions about how this works, please contact us.
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