Notice: New Website Design Will Be Implemented On March 14th

3/11/2013

Abstract:

Starting just after midnight March 14, 2013, we will be changing the design of our entire website: public site, all communities and all Virtual Classrooms.

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Full News Release:

Starting just after midnight March 14, 2013, we will be changing the design of our entire website: public site, all communities and all Virtual Classrooms. We have used the current design for the last three years and this change will allow us to not only refresh its graphic design but also pave the way for additional new technical features that will be added later this spring.

This upgrade will be pre-staged and implemented to be minimally disruptive. However, as a live functioning 24x7 website, there may be some minor inconveniences during the cut over. Operations of the entire website will be continuous during the cut over period.

We are planning the cutover period to last only an hour or so, early in the morning of March 14th. In any event, conversion should be complete by open of business on the morning of March 14th.

If as a resulting of our final testing of the pre-staged cut over we determine that the cut over will be more disruptive than we currently anticipate, we may delay the start of the cut over a day or two in order to refine the cut over package to be sure we have a smooth transition.

All currently enrolled students participating in active classes should not experience any disruption at all. Also, all Virtual Classroom features and functions will continue to operate as always.

Our public visitors may experience some minor inconveniences as we rearrange links and navigation. The period of these types of disruptions will be brief.

Our new design will leverage all of the new features and functions that have been added to the recent upgrade of our core content management system. As a standard operating procedure, we continually upgrade our core systems, typically three to four times per year. While our website operates on these technical upgrades as they occur, at some point it is a best practice to totally replace the presentation layer of the website and its cascading style sheet (CSS) with a totally new and clean design to be able to get the most out of technology upgrades and support for new browser releases. Our new design accomplishes this best practice and incorporates all of our new technical features and enhancements.

Some of our future enhancements will be subtle and gradual as we add new presentation features to our content’s presentation.

Other enhancement will be far more noticeable.

Shortly after we finish the cut over to the new design, within weeks, you will see the first of these major new enhancements when we launch our new mobile site. Currently, all users are served one set of pages to all devices, desktop or mobile. Also, like most legacy websites, our one set of pages have been designed for desktop browsers. When our mobile site is completed, all of our web pages will have a have a unique design that is optimized for mobile devices such as smartphones. Through the advanced capabilities of our content management system (CMS), will serve web pages that are optimized for your device, desktop or mobile. Our CMS allows us to author pages once and the CMS will serve those pages to multiple devices using a unique design and navigation that is customized and optimized for each type of device used to access the site.

Serving all of our pages customized for mobile browsers completes our support mobile devices. The first step in this evolution happened earlier this year when we started supporting both desktop and mobile devices for all of our video media. Serving customized pages optimized for mobile devices completes our philosophy of supporting “any device at any time.”

Additional features will be added throughout the Spring of
2013 and will be announced as we add them to the public website, our communities and our Virtual Classrooms.

Thank you for your patronage and I hope you enjoy the new website design.

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