Hi!  We’re White Whale Web Services of Oakland, California, and we’re delighted to be working with CC on your Web site redesign.    We work almost exclusively with colleges and universities, and if we’ve learned anything in our decade or so doing this, it’s that each of our clients winds up being completely unique and interesting; we couldn’t bring a cookie-cutter approach to this work even if we wanted to (which we don’t). So the first step in any new project is getting to know the client: that’s why we’re coming to CC this week (on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday).

There are six of us in the company (five full-time, and one contract developer), and all six of us are coming to campus.  There are essentially three primary purposes to our visit:

1. To immerse ourselves in Colorado College’s environment: taking photos, meeting people, asking questions, and generally doing everything possible to get a feel for CC’s unique culture.
2. To  give you (that is, everyone with a stake in the CC Web site) a platform to present your likes and dislikes, with an emphasis on where you’d like to see the CC site go in its next iteration (and over the next several years).
3. To make it clear to everyone at CC that this redesign will be community-powered, and driven by ideas, stories, and content created by your own community.  Our role as designers and site architects is to develop designs, strategies, and best practices for a great new site, but we need you to help us fill in the details.

Note from Karen: If you missed the digest messages and would like to meet White Whale, there’s a drop-in session at 4 p.m. on Thursday in Worner 212. If you can’t make that session, please contact me and I’ll let you know which other session(s) might be of interest to you.