CMS Users

Includes staff, faculty, and some students who utilize the BigTree CMS to contribute, edit, and maintain content on MICA's primary website. This group includes editors, publishers, and administrators.

CMS User Community

All CMS Users are automatically opted into and encouraged to participate in the CMS User Community. This group meets once per month to discuss high-level website and CMS-related topics (e.g. accessibility, forms, data sources), plans for the website, CMS training, specific topics to help enhance the CMS users abilities (e.g. how to utilize a table for lots of data), and to receive feedback from CMS users.

Main Areas of Content

Encyclopedia

Encyclopedia pages have a reading experience with less tangentially related promotional content keeping the user focused on the purpose of the page. Short word counts and straightforward sectioning promote more legible and scannable content.

CMS users are free to contribute and edit content in their respective areas. Most sections of the site have editors and publishers outside of the Strategic Communications office. In these cases, no intervention from Strategic Communications is necessary. When there is content created with no clear publisher responsible for where it lives, the Strategic Communications office can and will act as publishers.

Home Page and Salon

The Home Page and Salon contain curated content that most overtly supports MICA's strategic positioning. Many content creators contribute to the site as a whole and the Strategic Communications team regularly curates content for the home page to engage multiple audiences externally and internally.

Information Architecture

Sections

Sections are theme landing pages that are used to group Topics. Each Section has a single page that can use a limited selection of components and will automatically list the Topics that are assigned to that Section. Section pages are used to introduce the group of Topics and give context to the importance of the grouping.

Topics and Subpages

Topic pages are essentially normal webpages. Topics are pieces of content that need to be visible by name in both the Explore by Section and the A-Z Menus. Each Topic has only one Topic Detail page and must be assigned to only one Section but can be related to other areas of the site using taxonomic tags. Topics can have multiple Subpages. Subpages offer the ability to go into further detail on topics and offer the ability to expand the IA and organize information within Topics that would otherwise overwhelm the end user on single Topic Pages. Subpages are not visible in the Explore by Section or A-Z Menus, but will be visible on the Topic Detail pages.

Changes to MICA.edu's Information Architecture

Changes involving creating new sections, renaming or deleting existing sections, or moving topics from one section to another require discussion with the strategic communications team.