Fall Color at Stanford University

Working at the Stanford Center for Professional Development

/ Web Development / By

For seven years from 2007-2014, I worked fulltime at the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) at Stanford University. I started as a temp worker, coding html pages for their planned new, main website. After several years as a contractor heavily involved in SCPD’s web operations, I accepted their offer of a fixed term appointment as a Web Developer and Photographer, which was extended three times.

SCPD provides Stanford graduate engineering courses and professional development programs to working engineers, primarily over the internet. SCPD’s websites are crucial to their mission. I maintained the main SCPD site, many mini-sites dedicated to special programs, and hundreds of landing pages.

Making a Positive First Impression

The first impression that people have of an organization is often made through their web sites. Expectations are high for visitors to SCPD sites, typically very smart engineers hoping to improve their careers through Stanford engineering education; I took ownership of meeting those expectations and making a positive first impression.

New Main Site, Mini-Sites, and Landing Pages

SCPD brought me in to help code their new, main site in 2007. The initial design, based on screen renderings produced by a print designer, proved inadequate when coded and tested. SCPD eventually connected with Kapow, a professional design firm with many outstanding sites to their credit. Kapow’s process included a thorough needs assessment, user testing of designs, and delivery of working pages in a variety of layouts. Using their designs, I coded many pages for the new site, culminating in a launch in 2008 with much fanfare. The new site was a huge improvement over the previous, both functionally and aesthetically, and a rallying point for SCPD after a massive development effort involving nearly everyone in the organization.

Additional Kapow designs of mini-sites and landing pages followed—they started with existing versions that I had created earlier. Once Kapow handed over a finished design, I coded the final mini-site or landing page, tweaked it as needed to work on SCPD servers, and maintained it over the long term.

Website Maintenance

SCPD offers many programs over the course of each year, so sites were continually updated. To manage the steady volume of update requests from program managers and others, we used an online web request program. This enabled us to prioritize, queue, and handle requests in reasonable fashion.

Under the pressure to implement requests quickly, quality can take a back seat. Throughout all updates, I preserved the integrity of the original designs, using existing layouts and style sheets as much as possible. When new designs were needed to accommodate changes such as new layouts, I worked carefully to extend the existing design to preserve the original look and feel.

Modern websites are incredibly complex, and it can be a challenge to keep them looking fresh, and working as they should, over the long term. With several people maintaining the sites, some inexperienced and operating in uncoordinated fashion, it was not unusual for a seemingly simple update, typically to a style sheet or JavaScript code, to have unexpected side effects elsewhere on the site. In the worst cases, layouts were broken, or crucial operating features were disabled, on pages the developer might never imagine would be affected, so never thought to check. I was vigilant in testing pages regularly throughout each site, in various browsers, to proactively catch and correct such problems, which could easily go undetected and proliferate.

At SCPD, decisions on websites were made collaboratively which typically required several iterations where multiple designs were considered and tweaked. I am accustomed to being part of a team, and taking a lead role in collaborations when necessary.

I produced many photographs appearing on the sites, often of the picturesque Stanford campus, see samples at https://gerardlum.smugmug.com/Stanford.

Samples

Screen shots of some representative sites maintained, or created and maintained, by me appear below. I would have provided links, but the actual sites are no longer live.

Samples: SCPD Main Website

On the SCPD main website, I maintained the pages which describe the many services provided by SCPD, the complex admission procedures, profiles of engineers who have completed SCPD programs, and more. (Pages related to course registration, provided by Destiny Solutions, were maintained by others.)

The main site, designed in collaboration with the professional design firm Kapow, was typical of the time of its launch in 2008—information-heavy using small type, included Flash, and designed with a fixed width for viewing on desktop monitors. The site had dozens of pages, accessed through a complex menu. Detailed styling was achieved with very complex style sheets. (In 2008, this was state-of-the-art. Over the next few years, with the advent of tablets and smartphones, web design changed dramatically with the emergence of mobile-first strategies and responsive designs.)

Following are two representative screenshots:

SCPD stayed with this version of the main site for nearly six years until July 2014, when it was replaced with a new, responsive, Drupal version.

Samples: SCPD Mini-sites, Responsive

Mini-sites are smaller websites dedicated to a single program offered by SCPD. Kapow designed a responsive mini-site for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate in early 2013; I extended the original design to other similar programs, standardizing the look and feel, and simplifying maintenance. In all cases, we were careful to incorporate the Stanford branding specified by the Stanford Identity Toolkit.

Following are screenshots of three such mini-sites (desktop view):

The actual mini-sites I created and maintained were later incorporated into sections of a larger, Stanford Online website, after my time at SCPD.

Samples: Photographs of the Stanford Campus

I produced many photographs of the picturesque Stanford campus for use on SCPD sites and marketing materials, see https://gerardlum.smugmug.com/Stanford.