Beloit College
Beloit College is a private, coeducational liberal arts college in Beloit, Wisconsin with roughly 1300 undergraduate students and approximately 400 faculty and staff members.
The Reason Team
- Web team: Melissa Dix, Assistant Director for Web Services & Matt Rose, Web Developer/Designer
- Scope of team responsibilities: design and content management of Beloit College website, creation and updating of websites in the Beloit College domain, web training for faculty, staff and students.
History and CMS Selection Process
Beloit College used Dreamweaver as its primary WYSIWYG editing tool. There was no CMS in place prior to Reason. The motivator to adopt a CMS was the lack of organization and the need to prune old, outdated content on the existing site. The decision to move to a CMS was first suggested by Web Services in 2005. In 2008 a Web Team was appointed by the Interim President to assist Web Services with the migration to a CMS. Web Services evaluated a variety of commercial and open soure possibilities and recommended Reason because it had been developed and implemented by a peer institution and met our needs more completely than any other offering.
Current Status
Beloit Homepage Before Reason: http://campus.beloit.edu
Beloit Homepage After Reason: http://www.beloit.edu
We are still very early in the implementation process. We launched our new Reason managed site on September 3, 2009. We will begin training in October. The users that we have trained have had a very positive response and find Reason to be easier to use than the previous method(s). Reason has exceeded our expectations in its flexibility and scalability. As the needs of every institution are different, we found there were some things we wanted to do that weren’t built in, however creating modules to accomplish our tasks has proven to be relatively painless.
The support from the Reason development team has been amazing and has far exceeded our expectations. Through the use of the online community and direct contact with the developers we have been able to get our questions answered quickly and thoroughly.
A Favorite Thing
Our favorite thing about Reason is that it gives us the capability to have our users keep their content current in a user friendly way. This allows us to spend less time doing content updates and more time developing web applications and improving our overall presence and message on the internet.
Contact information for the Beloit College Web Services team can be found at http://www.beloit.edu/isr/webservicesinfo.