Cube Website Development

The Plan

Summer 2015
While working with the Cube, I realized that because so much of the program’s value is to provide information to the SMU students who use the Cube, the Cube needed its own, multi functional website. I am minoring in CS and decided to lead this project. I am passionate about the Cube’s mission to help students advance their ideas, and building this website is an essential step to accomplish that goal.

The Process
There were several different options available for creating the Cube’s website, and it was my responsibility for deciding on the best solution given our constraints.
 
Due to the need for dynamic content (the online directory of Cube users) and the desire for a short and unique web address as well as a visual design that differed from SMU’s main website layout, the initial thought was that I would have to build the Cube website “manually” by writing all the code (HMTL/CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL) for the site. Before any code was written, I worked closely with the SMU IT department to determine what all of the Cube’s options were for web development. 

After examining all of the different web development options that SMU offered, and negotiating with the SMU IT department and with the SMU department of Engaged Learning, I was able to arrange for the Cube to be able to host its own website on 3rd party web servers, while also maintaining some of its  basic program information on SMU’s main website. This arrangement was highly beneficial for the Cube as it allowed us the flexibility that we needed to produce the website the way we wanted.

The Barriers
The Cube is an SMU program, and thus the website must pass SMU standards. This created several bureaucratic road-blocks that I had to navigate in order to make the website a reality.
  • I had to work closely with the SMU IT department and convince them of the legitimacy of our project as well as convince them of why our site requires certain advanced features such as the online directory
  • I was responsible for making sure that we are able to find a solution to these road-blocks created by working with the larger SMU organization and keeping the project on track

The Solution
I determined that the best option for the Cube web development was to build out the site using WordPress because using WordPress satisfied the main constraints that faced the Cube:

Time
Building the website with WordPress allowed for us to get the professional quality that we wanted for the website while drastically reducing the time needed to develop the website. 
  • We had to have the website fully functional by the end of August, so were were on a tight development schedule
  • Our requirements of having a fully functional member directory would have added a large amount of time to the website development if we had coded the site manually, but using WordPress allowed us to get this functionality with very little set-up time. 
Serviceability
​Using WordPress to build the site allows members of the Cube’s Board to maintain and manage the website who do not have the technical knowledge needed to understand and manipulate the raw code needed to build our website. 
  • This increased ease of serviceability allows not only for current student managers of the Cube to manage and update the website, but also ensures that the website will be maintainable by future Cube managers after myself and the current Cube board have graduated and left SMU.