Creating Architectures for Coherent Experiences
PROJECT OVERVIEW
As part of a broad communications strategy, the engineering school at Princeton University embarked on a massive redesign of its website. The highest priority was designing a coherent experience that demonstrates the school’s strength in research and collaboration across the university.
CONTENT MODELLING + DATA ARCHITECTURE
The previous website relied on a folksonomy to classify content. Although user-generated tags are useful, they’re less structured than taxonomies. After an executive committee defined a new taxonomy of eight impact areas, I began developing a content model with three goals in mind:
Help audiences understand complex relationships between content.
Provide journalists a way to create and direct content with clear publishing controls.
Give frontend developers greater flexibility to design content.
Using a modern content management system, I defined an architecture based on a many-to-many relationship paradigm. This architecture provides writers flexible ways to produce and relate various pieces of content with others. The core relationships are defined as follows.
DEVELOPMENT
A team of journalists cover stories ranging from Nobel Prize winning faculty and student research to industry-related events and alumni success. As the lead back-end developer, I created a content migration plan to ensure these stories, as well as new ones, would continue to be told.
Using Javascript and Python, I wrote code to map the existing content to the new content model by transforming the XML data to JSON.
ANATOMY OF A NEWS STORY
With this new architecture, journalists had the publishing tools to produce and relate news to Impact Areas, Faculty, Departments, and Centers.
The architecture also provides tokens for designers to redesign stories in future iterations.
This architecture supports the production and design of news, impact area, departments, centers, and profiles.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This was my first major project as a backend developer that involved working with users to create content models and data architectures.
The site was launched in 2017 and has received several design changes as well as new features.