A Colophon almost always occurs at the very end of a book. It contains factual information about the book, especially about its production, and includes details about typographic style, the fonts used, the paper used, and perhaps the binding method of the book. We play a little fast and loose with that definition on websites.
Current Version
The current version of our website runs on the ThrillShare platform developed by Apptegy. The basic idea is to tie together the website for visitors and an app for current families. The homepage was designed by SimpleStrat.
The scope of the website was vastly decreased from previous versions and the Hierarchy was flattened. Part of the information architecture change was intentional and part of it was in response to some limitations in the ThrillShare platform.
History
This is the fifth incarnation of our school website. It went live in August of 2010. The chance that it will be the final version is relatively small.
Version 1
This is the first version of the Lincoln Lutheran website. It was put together by Dan Hellerich while he was a student here. He also provided a great deal of other useful technology oriented services while he attended and after he graduated. I’m not sure when we started using this version. It was around when I arrived in August of 2001.
Version 2
This is the second version of the Lincoln Lutheran website. It was put together by Lloyd Sommerer, one of Lincoln Lutheran’s teachers. It was intended to have multiple tabs of information across the top, but somehow there was never enough time for anyone to write that information. It went live around August of 2004.
Version 2.5
This is a working test of how the navigation would have worked in the 2.0 version had more content been available. You can see that the idea of using large graphical tabs that contain expandable content areas developed here. The form it took in version 3.0 turned out to be a little more sophisticated. You can see a working model of the navigation here.
Although this version of the site never really got off the ground, we did add some functionality that made the site more useful and interactive. Our original intention was to use Xaraya as a content management system, but we only got as far as using it for entering news articles. We had more success using Plans Calendar, which is still a great stand alone calendar program for schools and other organizations with multiple people adding content.
Version 3.0
The theme for version three of our website is a highly modified version of a theme from the good people at Project Seven. This was meant as a short term solution that ended up being used for several year. This is the first version of our website that used Drupal (version 5). We switched to Drupal because of it’s great taxonomy features and the ability to add our own content types with their own displays. You can play with the front page without any of the Drupal stuff here. Or view the remnants of this version. This version went live around January of 2008.
Version 4
This version was in use from 2010 to 2019. The software that ran this version of our website was Drupal 6.x, an Open Source Content Management System. Drupal is great software, and the Drupal community was an excellent help in getting our website up and running. Locally, we use TextPad on the PC and TextWrangler on the Mac for editing and use Adobe Photoshop for graphics processing on both platforms.
Running our school website is, by design, a very distributed process. Rather than having a few people responsible for updating it, all of our administrators, teachers, staff members, coaches, parents and students can add content. Some content goes directly onto the website and some must be approved before everyone can see it. Mr. Sommerer maintains our Drupal installation and is generally in charge of things. Our current theme was designed by Pickering Creative Group from these design documents. The information architecture is a hodgepodge of ideas stolen from various post secondary institutions with the help of eduStyle.net. Katie Bockelman is responsible for the majority of photographs found on this version of our website.
We looked for several examples from other websites. These sites represent layouts that we like, not necessarily themes that we like.
Several wireframes were created during the design process for this version.
