When you wear a lot of hats (as we tend to in higher ed), it’s a relief when you have a tool that makes your life easier. For me, it’s our CMS. As we gear up for a redesign, I can’t help but reflect on how great my experience has been over the last four years since we became a LiveWhale school. Working with the CMS let me fall in love with content strategy and has helped me see the bigger picture of our website.
LiveWhale CMS is tailored for higher education. Faculty, offices, student clubs—everyone can easily edit their own static content, create stories and events, or upload full photo galleries. The WYSIWYG editor is as simple as Microsoft Word, and the dynamic content creation echoes the ease of popular social media that these folks use anyway. The back end organization makes it even easier to control who has access to edit what, but dynamic content can be shared easily from group to group.
What I like best is that I don’t have to say “no” often. If someone comes to me and asks, “Can I do X with my content?” I can usually figure out a way to do it with LiveWhale in 10 minutes. My favorite example of this is Path to Passion, which came out of an idea our Volunteer Coordinator had. She asked me, “Can I make a searchable thing with profiles of alumni?” and we went from “I think so” to “here you go” in record time. This was made much more simple by having a profiles module in our CMS where we could update or create profiles for our alumni. One of the coolest results of this project? We got to present it at eduWeb Digital Summit.
The support from LiveWhale is also top notch. I mentioned the hats? Well, sometimes quirks and bugs are outside my wheelhouse, and I just can’t fix them. The support team at LiveWhale is amazing at diagnosing and correcting any issues with the CMS. They’re just an email away. Plus, the entire LiveWhale family—you know, other schools who use LiveWhale CMS—is part of a Basecamp where we can discuss ideas and developments for the CMS, which is an open development platform. The sharing with this crew and with the Whales themselves is a unique atmosphere I can’t imagine with any other product. Like I said, it’s a family. We may all be in the business of recruiting students—some of us possibly in direct competition for the same kids—but we’re also always there to help each other with ideas!
To be completely honest, LiveWhale is one of the reasons I love my job in higher education. Working with the LiveWhale team, the extended LiveWhale family, and the faculty, staff, and students at my college make my days better. I’m constantly learning, and as a liberal arts grad working at a liberal arts school, I couldn’t appreciate it more.